Introduction
Welcome to the pulse™ 1.2 early access page! Here you will find new pulse™ 1.2 milestone releases, along with information about what is new in version 1.2.
How To Participate
Would you like to try milestone releases of pulse™ 1.2? It's as simple as following these steps:
- Download the latest milestone packages from below.
- If you do not already have a license, you can download one from zutubi.com
, or request one directly during the pulse™ setup wizard.
- Refer to the Getting Started Guide for information about how to install and start using pulse™.
- Enjoy!
Reporting Bugs/Feature Requests
During the early access program, we expect there to be some teething issues with the milestone builds. If you find such an issue, you can report it in our issue tracker.
This is also a great opportunity to suggest minor features and enhancements that you would like to make it in to version 1.2. Such suggestions can be discussed on the forums or reported directly in our issue tracker.
Our thanks to all who take the trouble to give feedback. You're helping make pulse™ a better product for everyone!
Current Release
As of release 1.2.8 (12/12/2006), Pulse 1.2 has been promoted to the main Zutubi website. Packages are available from http://zutubi.com/products/pulse/downloads/.
Stethoscope packages are still available from below:
Known Issues
 | Compatibility
Users upgrading from 1.1 or earlier will notice that the old server scripts startup and shutdown no longer exist. They have been superceded by the combined pulse script (pulse.bat on Windows). Use "pulse start" and "pulse shutdown" in place of the old scripts. See Server Commands for details. |
| Agent Upgrades
Automatic agent upgrades will not work with every build. In particular, during the early access period we may need to make some changes to core components that cannot be upgraded. Once these components stabilise the vast majority of agent upgrades will be automated. |
What's New in 1.2
So what is all the fuss about? Version 1.2 is another major release of pulse™, with great new features. The major additions are described below.
Personal Builds
The headline feature for 1.2 is the ability to run personal builds. A personal build takes your local changes and applies them to a pulse™ build without you submitting them to your SCM first. This allows you to test your changes before submitting them to version control. You request personal builds using the personal build client which is part of the developer tools package.
Reports
Each pulse™ project now has its own "reports" page, which displays build data for the project visually. Currently, the reports show trends over time for:
- Build results
- Tests run per build
- Build time
- Stage execution time
Have you got an idea for another report? Let us know!
Windows System Tray Notification
Version 1.2 contains a standalone Windows client to monitor your pulse™ server. This client, named Stethoscope, sits in your system tray allowing you to see your project health at a glance. You can configure Stethoscope to monitor both personal builds and project builds for your selected projects. If you like, Stethoscope will pop up a message whenever a build completes.
Customisable Notifications
Don't like the format of your notification emails or instant messages? In pulse™ 1.2, the notification templates can be customised using FreeMarker. You can add as many new templates as you like, and they will be available to all users. Macros are available to generate common content, making it simple to tweak the templates to your preference.
Automatic Agent Upgrades
We go to great effort to make pulse™ easy to install, upgrade and maintain. That is why in pulse™ 1.2 we have made the upgrade process even simpler by adding automatic upgrades for agent machines. Now, after you upgrade your main pulse™ server, your agents will be automatically upgraded for you!
Project Groups
A much-requested feature, in pulse™ 1.2 you can now organise your projects into logical groups. These groups allow you to manage large numbers of projects more easily. Individual users can also choose which groups to show/hide on their personal dashboard.
Resource Configuration Wizard
On the same theme of keeping things simple, we have also added a new resource configuration wizard. This wizard makes it easy for you to configure common build dependencies, such as java Development Kits and build tools (ant, make, etc). We have also improved the resource auto-discovery code to detect resource versions for you: in many cases you won't even need the wizard!
Anonymous Signup
You can now optionally allow users to sign up to pulse™ themselves. This lessens the burden on the pulse™ administrator by removing the need for them to create accounts. It is also perfect for public-facing servers (e.g. open source projects) where interested parties can sign up for read-only access but with their own dashboard and preferences.
Improved Remote API
You can now create projects, create and delete users, create, enable and disable agents all via the remote API. These and other noew functionality have been added to allow you to extend pulse™ to suit your needs.
Commit Message Transformers
In pulse™ 1.1 you were able to link text in your commit messages to external tools (e.g. link "bug 123" to your bug tracker). In 1.2, we have made this even easier by adding support for common tools. You can also transform commit messages in other arbitrary ways, allowing you to highlight the information you want to see.
Change Viewers
In pulse™ 1.1, you were able to link changelist numbers to an external change viewer such as Fisheye, Trac or ViewVC. In 1.2 we have made this even simpler by providing built in support for these popular tools. You can now also link individual files to view, download and diff pages in your change viewer!
Customisable Build Columns
Select the build information you want to see on a per-user and per-view basis. You can even reorder the build columns in build result tables by dragging and dropping!
"Broken Since" Support for Failed Tests
Failed test cases are now displayed differently if they also failed in the previous (or earlier) build. This makes it easy to differentiate new failures from existing failures, and see exactly who broke what and when.
LDAP Integration for Groups
LDAP integration has been extended allowing you to base pulse™ group membership on your LDAP groups. By mirroring LDAP groups within pulse™, you can reduce your maintainance burden by using LDAP for all group membership operations.
Manually Specify Build Properties
It is now possible to manually specify build properties when a build is manually triggered. This feature allows you to easily integrate pulse™ with a manual release process. Now you can use you pulse™ server to generate your final release packages quickly and easily.
And much, much more!
The list doesn't end there. Other improvements include:
- The ability to enable/disable triggers
- Increased information in instant message notifications
- Unit test information is now included in notification emails
- RSS feeds are available for your configured dashboard projects
- You can now download agent and dev packages from the pulse™ master server
- Bootstrapping has been improved to display real time output and allow cancellation
- Improved "projects" view with more quick-access links
- The ability to cancel queued builds
- Post-stage actions: hook in custom actions after individual build stages
- Automatic database backups on upgrade
- Manually trigger project cleanup rules
- Build warnings are highlighted by colouring the build result yellow, and may be shown in a new build column
- Configuration of projects that use custom build tools from the web interface
And we're not done yet! See the full Release Notes for details.
