Plugin Information

This plugin enables slaves to auto-discover nearby Hudson master and join it automatically, thereby forming an ad-hoc cluster.
This plugin consists of two pieces:

1. A self-contained CLI client that discovers a nearby Hudson (via a UDP broadcast) and joins it
2. A plugin that needs to be installed on Hudson master to accept swarm clients

The primary use case of this came from "Hudson slave appliance" — a virtual machine pre-packaged with the swarm client CLI — that someone can just grab and run.

With the swarm client, a person who's willing to contribute some of his computing power to the cluster just needs to run this virtual machine, and the cluster automatically gets additional resources. Because it's packaged as a VM, he need not worry about the builds/tests interfering with the host system or alter its settings unexpectedly.

Usage

1. Install the swarm plugin from the update center
2. Download the CLI agent from here.
3. Run the CLI agent like java -jar path/to/swarm-client-jar-with-dependencies.jar. There's no required command option, but run with the -help option to see the available options.

Available Options

% java -jar swarm-client-jar-with-dependencies.jar -help 
 -description VAL : Description to be put on the slave
 -executors N     : Number of executors
 -fsroot FILE     : Directory where Hudson places files
 -help (--help)   : Show the help screen
 -labels VAL      : Whitespace-separated list of labels to be assigned for this
                    slave
 -master VAL      : Host name or IP address of the master. If this option is
                    specified, auto-discovery will be skipped
 -name VAL        : Name of the slave

FAQ

Error configuration : "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx doesn't have the URL configuration yet"

This error indicates that the Hudson master running at the given URL has never configured, and therefore the swarm client cannot determine its HTTP URL. To fix this problem, please go to the system configuration screen of this Hudson, and click "submit".

Changelog

Version 1.3 (2010 Jan 14)

• Fixed a packaging problem in the client jar (issue #5275)

  Version 1.2 (2009 Dec 30)

• Minor text correction

Version 1.1 (2009 Jul 15)

• Added the -master option.

Version 1.0 (2009 May 23)

• Initial release