What is "Started by an SCM change" in Hudson?

Question

I was trying to find out who triggered the failing Hudson build. But i found Started by an SCM change instead of Started by 'UserId'. Now, what does that mean?

Answer 1

It means that someone checked in code changes to your version control system / software configuration management (CVS, SVN, Git, etc), and Hudson started a built based on that change.

You should be able to see who it was by clicking the "Changes" link on the left menu.

Answer 2

"SCM" is "software configuration management", i.e. your version control system. Hudson can be configured to poll CVS, SVN etc for changes to your source code, and trigger a build based on that change.

Answer 3

I was working on a script to fire off an email with a list of changeset to a developer who started the build. After spending a couple hours on the web trying to search for a solution, I found a workaround digging through hudson log files. Probably not the cleanest way of doing it, but it works. Every time when hudson fire off a build, it records the build status to a log file. The log looks something like this..

Started by user <****>
Building remotely on Slave1
$ hg clone -r test_clone https://mercuial.com/build /some/workspace/test_clone
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 355 changesets with 298 changes to 43 files
updating to branch default
41 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
...
...

The log file is in ~workspace/jobs/${RELEASE}/builds/${BUILD_NUMBER}/log. You can then parse the log file for the UserId. Something like this should work.

UserID=head -1 ~workspace/jobs/${RELEASE}/builds/${BUILD_NUMBER}/log|cut -d" " -f4