I've a Jenkins server running tests for most of my open-source projects now: https://jenkins.gedmin.as/. It was not too difficult to set up:
- Send an email to Jesse Noller about that free Rackspace Cloud hosting for OSS projects, expecting to be rebuffed because all my projects are small and insignificant.
- Receive a positive response with the instructions. Yay!
- Sign up for an account, type in all my credit card details and personal phone numbers, get it verified by a phone call (I hate phone calls, but apparently it prevents fraud or something). Send the account name/ID back to Jesse.
- Log in to the MyCloud account control panel/dashboard/thingie, create a server, ask for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
- Wait a couple of minutes, ssh as root, do the usual setup (locale-gen, adduser, ~/.ssh/authorized_keys, dotfiles, etckeeper, postfix, my PPA for sysadmin automation stuff).
- There was an amusing interlude where I tried to set up the Rackspace Cloud Monitoring agent according to their instructions, failed, had to open a support ticket, give their techs a login with root, then wait less than 24 hours until it was resolved. I still don't know what went wrong, but it works now.
- Get and install a free SSL certificate from StartSSL.
- Install and configure Jenkins (latest upstream version, just in case).
- Point my DNS to the server's IP.
It's been running this way for a month now, with no problems. So, thanks, Rackspace!
Grand plans for the future: have Jenkins do daily/weekly mirrors of all my GitHub repos, look for commits made since the last release tag, filter out boring ones ("bump version number"), and send me reminders that "project X needs a new release: you've new features sitting there unreleased for X days now". Or maybe just a web page with a table of "X commits since last release" linking to GitHub history.
P. S. I can't preview this since PyBlosxom fails to run on my laptop with a cryptic error. I'm debating debugging this versus migrating to a static blog compiler.