Getting Jenkins to Check Out from Subversion

Jenkins comes with an SVN plug-in. When I went to Manage Jenkins > Manage Plugins it alerted me to an update to the SVN plug-in, which I updated. I checked the little box to have Jenkins re-start once the installation was complete, but it didn't. I had to go to the "Installed" tab of the plug-ins view and click the button there to re-start Jenkins.

Then I created a Jenkins project to just checkout some code from Subversion. After choosing to start a new build project I checked the Subversion radio control under Source Code Management, specified the URL to our SVN repository and set the Local module directory to '.\TestBuild' so I could evaluate where Jenkins puts things. Jenkins tried to immediately access the repository and I was warned that it could not access it because it appeared I was missing credentials. I added those credentials through the separate pop-up window that displayed. Jenkins then confirmed that it could access the repository. I left the other options there are their default values. I didn't add a build step nor any post-build options.

I went to the Dashboard and scheduled a build. The build indicator began to build indicating that the build was in progress. After a couple minutes it did not change, so I refreshed the dashboard and was shown that the last build was successful 2 minutes ago and only took 5.1 seconds. Having to refresh was no big deal, since the same thing happens with the CCNet web interface.

Now I just needed to confirm that Jenkins was able to check out the source code. In my Jenkins installation folder is a directory called jobs. Within that was a directory named the same as the name I gave my Jenkins job. Under that, along with some configuration files, are now two directories: builds and workspace. The builds directory has a directory named with a date-time stamp that is essentially empty. Under workspace is my TestBuild directory and under that the source code. I should have left the workspace path as '.'.

So now I'm moving on to creating a build step to have Jenkins use MSBuild to build my project.