Hudson and ClearCase

If you want your company to be more agile and want to install a Continuous Integration system, but are stuck on Clear Case, here is a little howto. I am normally a Linux/Unix boy, but Windows was mandated.

Download and install a servlet container such as Tomcat. Secondly, download the Hudson war file. You can (should) define a HUDSON_HOME environment variable. Start Tomcat, deploy the Hudson war to the webapps dir, the "jobs" and "plugins" directories should be created in your HUDSON_HOME directory.

Either use the builtin plugin manager page, or if like me you can't get it to work, download the Clear Case plugin manually and put it in the HUDSON_HOME/plugin directory and restart Tomcat.

Go to http://localhost:8080/hudson/ and choose "Manage Hudson" -> "Configure System". Configure the Cleartool executable home (usually c:\program files\rational\clearcase\bin\cleartool), and other tools/services you might use for your projects (Ant, Maven, SMTP server etc)

Select "New job" -> "Build a free-style software project" and select a name, press "ok".

How to configure stuff here depends on how your Clear Case administrator has set up your system, but this is what worked for me.
Select the "UCM ClearCase" radio button and configure the following fields:
View name - select a new unique view name, for instance "hudson_myproject". This is the view that Hudson will create for you.
Stream selector - this is very project dependent, this is how I figured out my stream name: If you have the ClearCase Explorer tool, select "Toolbox" tab -> "UCM" dropdown -> "Join project" link -> select your project -> "Properties" button. Now directly under the project name you see a string somewhat like the following:
project:myproject_1.0@\servername
Then the following should be your stream name:
myproject_1.0@\servername
If you have checked out a project view before with CC Explorer manually to the default drive (usually M:) you can go to M: with Windows Explorer and rightclick on the directory there and select ClearCase tab, then properties. You should be able to get the Stream string from there too.
Load rules - Backslash + the path to a VOB (database file containing the project) just under the root of the project view. Again, if you have previously created a view using ClearCase explorer and mapped it to drive M:, go to M: and open the view directory there. Select one of the subdirs there as your "load rule". For example, I had
M:\myproject\src
so my "load rule" became
\src

Now press "advanced" button in Hudson config, and configure the following:
Additional mkview arguments - Here I had to use the -vws parameter to the mkview command, plus a UNC name. Something like this:
-vws \\companynetwork\clearcaseviewsserver\AD\myusername\
This is where Hudson will create the view directory, but the source itself will be checked out to, and built from, your HUDSON_HOME/jobs/jobname/builds/ directories.