Graphing your CruiseControl build times with Gruff

Mar 16, 2008 • Julian Simpson

Cruise Publisher
How do you get the build time in the first place? I wrote a CruiseControl publisher that called some Ruby code to extract the build duration from the CruiseControl log, which is an XML file. It was a very simple script that matched duration of the Ant build in the XML file, converted the text to a number of seconds, and then made an HTTP POST to a Rails application. The build duration got passed as a POST argument.

We had a Rails application to display other project information. So for us, this was a convenient way to store the information, with the date coming from the database. You could use a text file to store this information instead. Once everything was in place it was easy to write some more Ruby to make the graph appear.

The Code

require 'chart'
require 'gruff'

data = { "count" => [ 3, 5, 2 ] }
g = Gruff::Line.new 640
g.title = "Usages of the word 'foo'"
g.labels = { 0 => 'Monday', 1 => 'Tuesday', 2 => 'Wednesday'}
g.theme_rails_keynote
data.each_pair {|k, v| g.data(k, v)}
blob = g.to_blob

out = File.new("blob.png","w+")
out < blob

This code uses Gruff to actually generate the chart, and you'll need to install this separately. Pass it some data and it will build a PNG file with your graph. By plumbing it into the radiator, the trend in build times is visible to the entire room. It really helped to keep the team focussed on the length of the build - especially for browser based tests that can easy start to slow things down.