Set environment variable for build in hudson

Question

I am trying to put a maven2 project under continuous integration in hudson. The project uses selenium for some integration testing. Hudson is running on a headless linux. I am using xvfb to start a x server session for selenium.

In order to run the tests, I need to export an environment variable named DISPLAY. e.g.

export DISPLAY=:99

However, I don't want to set the variable on the box since it would affect all builds. I have tried to do a shell execute using the m2 extra steps plugin but it doesnt work since it is executed in a separate bash file, meaning that environment variables are not persisted.

Is there a way to register the environment variable from hudson.

Answer 1

fyi, I'm releasing the setenv plugin for Hudson today (assuming java.net recovers enough for me to do so!) - it behaves similarly to the parameterized build functionality, but with a simpler UI (just a textarea for input - key/value pairs are separated by newlines) and without the need to provide values for the parameters at build-time.

Answer 2

There's a new feature in Hudson that allows you to specify parameters for builds. This looks like it does what you want.

Though note that:

This is still a very young feature, so feedback appreciated

...

The parameter[s] are available as environment parameters. So e.g. a shell ($FOO, %FOO%) or Ant ( ${env.FOO} ) can access these values.