Hudson (software)

Hudson is a discontinued continuous integration (CI) tool written in Java, which runs in a servlet container such as Apache Tomcat or the GlassFish application server. It supports SCM tools including CVS, Subversion, Git, Perforce, Clearcase and RTC, and can execute Apache Ant and Apache Maven based projects, as well as arbitrary shell scripts and Windows batch commands. The primary developer of Hudson was Kohsuke Kawaguchi, who worked for Sun Microsystems at the time. Released under the MIT License, Hudson is free software.

Builds can be started by various means, including scheduling via a cron-like mechanism, building when other builds have completed, and by requesting a specific build URL.

Hudson became a popular alternative to CruiseControl and other open-source build servers in 2008. At JavaOne conference in May 2008, it was the winner of Duke's Choice Award in the Developer Solutions category.

When Oracle bought Sun, it declared its intention to trademark the Hudson name, and development began on a commercial version. It was decided by the majority of the development community, including Kawaguchi, to continue the project under the name Jenkins in early 2011. Oracle maintained that Hudson was continuing development and that Jenkins was a fork; the Jenkins developers considered Hudson to be the fork.

Interest in Hudson collapsed thereafter. Eventually Oracle donated the remaining Hudson project assets to the Eclipse Foundation at the end of 2012.

Having been replaced by Jenkins, Hudson is no longer maintained and was announced as obsolete in February 2017. The Hudson website, hudson-ci.org, was closed down on Jan 31, 2020.