An introduction to Gump

Gump is Apache's continuous integration tool. It is written in python and fully supports Apache Ant, Apache Maven and other build tools. Gump is unique in that it builds and compiles software against the latest development versions of those projects. This allows gump to detect potentially incompatible changes to that software just a few hours after those changes are checked into the version control system. Notifications are sent to the project team as soon as such a change is detected, referencing more detailed reports available online.

You can set up and run Gump on your own machine and run it on your own projects, however it is currently most famous for building most of Apache's java-based projects and their dependencies (which constitutes several million lines of code split up into hundreds of projects). For this purpose, the gump project maintains its own dedicated server.

Getting the information you need

Gump is not a trivial project. We compile thousands of sourcefiles every night, and try to send the right reports to hundreds of projects when something bad happens. This means that there's a lot to "get" about gump. We've tried to split the documentation up into useful parts based on their target audience. The following is available:

• How Gump Works -- an explanation of how Gump goes about its job, giving both a 50,000 feet overview and some information on our design goals and philosophy.
• How To Fix Gump Build Problems -- this document explains the steps you should take if gump send you or a project you participated in an e-mail.
• How To Get Built By Gump -- this document explains how to add new projects to gump, focussing mostly on the gump object model, our xml descriptors that tell gump how to "do its thing".
• Gump Object Model Reference -- this document details the entire gump object model.