Cerberus is a Continuous Builder software. Cerberus could be periodically run from scheduler and check if application tests are broken. If it happens then Cerberus will send notification to developers. Cerberus perfectly works both on Windows and *nix platforms.

For more CI theory read this document from Martin Fowler www.martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html.

Requirements:

ruby - 1.8.2 or higher
rake - 0.7 or higher

What ‘Cerberus’ name means? Quote from Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerberus)

Cerberus or Kerberos (Kerberos, demon of the pit), was the hound of Hades-a monstrous three-headed dog (sometimes said to have 50 or 100 heads) with a snake for a tail and innumerable snake heads on his back. He guarded the gate to Hades (the Greek underworld) and ensured that the dead could not leave and the living could not enter. His brother was Orthrus. He is the offspring of Echidna and Typhon.

So Cerberus will guard your tests and not allow your project to go to the world of dead.

There are several CI solutions already present, why do you need to use Cerberus? Main advantages of Cerberus over other solutions are:

1) Cerberus could be installed on any machine not only where SVN repository located.
2) Cerberus works not only for Rails projects, but for any other Ruby projects as well as for other platforms (Maven2 for Java)
3) Cerberus multiplatform solution: it runs excellent both on *nix and Windows.
4) Cerberus distributed via RubyGems, so it is very easy to install and very easy to update to the latest stable version
5) Cerberus very easy to start using. Just type 'cerberus add PROJECT_URL|PROJECT_DIR'
6) Cerberus is lightweight solution: most of the time ruby process even not runs - Rake runs only in case if changes in project sources are found.

To use Cerberus it is very easy. First install it. Easiest way to do it through RubyGems package manager.

‘gem install cerberus’

or get Cerberus distribution package right from download page rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=1794&release_id=6442

then you need to add project that will be watched by Cerberus. Do it by

cerberus add (DIR|SVN_URL) APPLICATION_NAME=some_app RECIPIENTS=dev1@project.com,dev2@project.com

as second parameter you could pass URL to subversion repository or directory with working SVN folder.

Go to ~/.cerberus and edit config.yml file (only once after installing Cerberus). Enter your configuration options here like email server, password, user_name and other options. See ActiveMailer description - Cerberus uses it as notification layer. My config file looks like this

publisher:

mail:
  address: mail.somesever.com
  user_name: anatol
  password: anatol
  domain: somesever.com
  authentication: login

Also check ~/.cerberus/config/<APPLICATION_NAME>.yml and make sure that you have right options.

And then run Cerberus

cerberus build APPLICATION_NAME # Run project

or

cerberus buildall # Run all available projects

It will check out latest sources and run tests for your application. If tests are broken - recipients will receive notifications.

But of course better run Cerberus automatically from Cron. Run Cerberus for project each 10 minutes would be ok.

Features

Cerberus currently supports the following SCM tools:

* Subversion
* Git
* Darcs
* Perforce
* CVS

Cerberus currently supports the following notification systems:

* Email
* Jabber
* IRC
* RSS
* Campfire
* Twitter

Cerberus currently supports the following build systems:

* Rake
* RSpec
* Rant
* Maven2
* Bjam

License

This plugin is licensed under the MIT license. Complete license text is included in the LICENSE file.

Author

This software was created by Anatol Pomozov <anatol.pomozov@gmail.com> and is located at cerberus.rubyforge.org.

Contributors

Craig P Jolicoeur <github.com/cpjolicoeur> Rob Kaufman <github.com/notch8>