GreenScreen

Introduction

GreenScreen is a build monitoring tool that is designed to be used as a dynamic Big Visible Chart (BVC) in your work area. It lets you add links to your build servers and displays the largest possible information on a monitor so that the team can see the build status from anywhere in the room.

Getting Started

To get the GreenScreen application itself, you can clone it from git:

$ git clone git://github.com/smlgbl/greenscreen.git

Or download the project by clicking on the 'download' link on this page.

To install all of GreenScreen's dependencies, switch to its directory and do:

$ rake -f init.rakefile

Once you've got GreenScreen on your machine, copy config.yml.sample to config.yml:

$ cp config.yml.sample config.yml

And then edit the config.yml file to add links to your build servers. It contains instructions for how you can add the. GreenScreen has been tested with Hudson, but can be used with any continuous integration server that conforms to the multiple project summary reporting standard.

This pretty much means that any of the flavours of cruise control should work too.

Once you've got your configuration, you can start GreenScreen as follows:

ruby greenscreen.rb

Then go to this URL in your browser:

http://localhost:4567/

You should see the status of all of your builds. The screen will refresh every 15 seconds to keep itself up to date.

If running on Windows, I'd suggest running Firefox in full screen mode. If on a Mac, either expand the window size to take up as much space as possible, or try finding a plugin that lets you go full screen.

Passenger or other rack handlers

GreenScreen also includes a rackup file (config.ru) so you can deploy it under whichever rack-supporting webserver you like.

Init files

I added quick&dirty init script, to get it started automatically, even though the solution mentioned in the paragraph above about rack handling is much better. Just copy the file greenscreen.init_script to /etc/init.d/greenscreen

$ sudo cp greenscreen.init_script /etc/init.d/greenscreen

Then change each occurence of 'home/samuel.gabel/greenscreen' to reflect the actual path. Do this for the init script as well as the start_greenscreen.sh script.