Chris Read

Ever since I started working for ThoughtWorks, I have heard people saying things along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had some kind of Cruise-in-a-box to help us get projects up and running quickly?”. After about 6 months I was thinking the same thing, and started tinkering around with various options. Nothing really happened, until the first week of January this year when a group of us who often fill “Build Master” type rolls were all in the office together with a few days unassigned to clients. We were all sitting around a desk together catching up, when somehow the topic once again emerged. With the critical mass in place, this sparked off the birth of Buildix.

The whole point of Buildix is to help any Java based Agile Development Project get up and running as quickly as possible buy providing them with pre-configured and integrated version control system, continuous integration framework, wiki and issue tracking system. We chose our favourite products in each of these areas – Subversion, CruiseControl and Trac. Another common difficulty faced by our development teams, especially in the early stages of a project, is network access. Sometimes all we get from our clients when we arrive on site is a switch to allow us to get our laptops to talk to each other – no DNS, file shares, anything. Buildix can also help in situations like this, as it also runs Samba, and will run as a DNS and DHCP server if given the correct kernel boot parameters.

So, six months after we started, and after a few internal releases, we decided to give something back to the community that helps us do our job, and make Buildix available to everyone. Enjoy!