I’m currently working on a bigger paper for university using LaTeX. As it’s necessary to compile source files multiple times (especially when using BibTeX or TOCs), build runs can take quite some time. As an example, my current build script:

#!/bin/bash
BN=paper
pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode $BN.tex
bibtex $BN
pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode $BN.tex
bibtex $BN
pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode $BN.tex
makeindex -s $BN.ist -t $BN.glg -o $BN.gls $BN.glo
pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode $BN.tex
pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode $BN.tex
rm -rf $BN.aux
rm -rf $BN.lof
rm -rf $BN.lot
rm -rf $BN.out
rm -rf $BN.toc
rm -rf $BN.bbl
rm -rf $BN.blg
rm -rf $BN.brf
rm -rf $BN.idx
rm -rf $BN.glo
rm -rf $BN.ist
rm -rf $BN.glg
rm -rf $BN.gls
rm -rf texput.log

This is OK on my workstation, but running a build on my notebook using a small 1.4 GHz single core processor can take up to a minute which is definitely too long. So I looked for solutions how to move the build process to a central server. As I was already using Git for source control on the project, I tried setting up a remote repository on the server which triggered a build using a post-receive script. This basically worked fine, but I wanted to go a step further. I had a look at CI servers and gave Hudson a try as it seems to have a lot of features while being quite easy to set up.

The result is the following: Hudson is polling the Git repository (can be remote or local, in my case it’s a self-hosted remote gitosis installation, but could be github too), starting a new build on changes and publishing the resulting PDF if successful. Hudson is accessible over https using an Apache2 server as frontend to a Tomcat installation.

Ready? Let’s go.

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