Last year I resigned to maintain my own VPS hosted CI server with Git Repos, Jenkins, Sonar, Maven repository, LDAP, etc... and moved source code repositories to GitHub. I'm uploading build artifacts into Sonatype OSSRH in case of libraries and with web applications deployments, I'm still experimenting with Openshift and some other services. But I also lost possibility do build and deploy project on demand. Fortunately many cloud hosted CI services popped up last year or two.
CircleCI
Predefined, not very extensive toolset for Java projects is avaliable. It has recognized my pom.xml automaticaly without any configuration. Uses circle.yml configuration file. It is does not have free plan (only trial), cheapest Solo plan is for $19/month.
Travis-CI
Java is quite well supported. It is cofigured using .travis.yml. There is free (unlimited) plan and also quite expensive paid plans
Codeship
Neat interface, but you are allowed to use only few preinstalled java tools. Free plan is limited to 50 builds per month, while Basic plan will cost you $49 per month.
drone.io
Simplistic with basic java support. Free unlimited plan.
Cloudbees DEV@Cloud
Jenkins in the cloud with all it's awesomeness. You can choose pretty much any Java, Maven or Gradle version you can imagine plus zillions of Jenkins plugins. Pricing is trickier here because billing is build time based and offering includes application hosting (you might not be interested in). Free plan includes 100 build minutes and there is also FOSS plan. Starter plan with 40 hours of build per month will cost you $60 + $17 = $77 per month
Another Cloudbees service is BuildHive where you will get unlimited number of builds, but you will use shared and slower Jenkins instance with very limited configuration and only for GitHub repositories.
Test drive with Phanbedder
I have recently built little library named Phanbedder and blogged about it few days ago. While very tiny in java code size, it is pretty unusual because it launches separate processes of bundeled PhantomJS native binary during the tests. This makes it perfect candidate for testing cloud CI services.
Good news is that every above mentioned service managed to compile and test it using mvn clean test -Denforcer.skip=true command. I use maven-enforcer-plugin to enforce Java 6 to be used for compilation. But because many of CIs offers only Java 7, I had to switch enforcer off...
Trickier part is execution of mvn deploy. I'm uploading maven snapshot artifacts into Sonatype OSSRH and also release versions later into Maven central. For snapshot deployment into Sonatype OSS Nexus, username and password must be provided to make maven-deploy-plugin work, otherwise...
[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-deploy-plugin:2.8.1:deploy (default-deploy) on project phanbedder-1.9.7: Failed to deploy artifacts: Could not transfer artifact net.anthavio:phanbedder-1.9.7:jar:1.0.1-20140422.184656-7 from/to sonatype-oss-snapshots (https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots): Failed to transfer file: https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/net/anthavio/phanbedder-1.9.7/1.0.1-SNAPSHOT/phanbedder-1.9.7-1.0.1-20140422.184656-7.jar. Return code is: 401, ReasonPhrase: Unauthorized. -> [Help 1]
Normaly, deployment credentials are stored inside your personal maven settings.xml, but obviously this file is not present on cloud CI server. Workarounds exists for Travis-ci. Cloudbees DEV@Cloud has most elegant solution, but I guess no deployment with undisclosed credentials can be done from BuildHive and others.
Now, here goes links to public success build logs for Travis-CI, drone.io, BuildHive and DEV@Cloud. Sadly CircleCI and Codeship does not seem to support public projects.
Mentioned CI services can be webhook triggered, provide integrated browser testing and deployment into popular cloud hosting services like Heroku or Google App Engine. They evolve pretty quickly as they add more integrations as I write... Listing and comparing features here is not worth the effort so check documentation pages.
Everybody has different needs. All my projects are open source hobby projects so I guess I'll go with webhook triggered snapshot builds on BuildHive or I might use Travis-CI to have it with snapshot deployments.
For Maven central release deployment builds, I see only one option - Cloudbees DEV@Cloud. In some next blog post, I'll describe how fully automatic deployment can be achieved using Cloudbees DEV@Cloud, maven-release-plugin and Sonatype OSSRH.
Happy cloud hosted CI builds!
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