Set up BuildWise CT Server Step by Step

Get your CT Server up and running under 10 minutes

5 min readJun 21, 2023

Zhimin: Yesterday, I received a support ticket from a new user, reporting “BuildWise Server failed to start up on Windows, using Ruby 3.2”. I quickly verified it was the case. Reasons are:
* Ruby 3.2 deprecated File.exists?* Psych 5 issue, load unspecified class: Time (Psych::DisallowedClass)
* ChildProcess on Window has an issue with redirecting stdout/stderr.
Anyway, we just released a new BuildWise Server release (v2.3.2) to resolve the above.

This article shows the BuildWise server set-up step by step with the latest release. While the screenshots are taken for Windows platform, the instructions are pretty much the same for macOS and Linux as well.

Table of Contents:
· 1. Install Ruby
· 2. Get Sample Selenium WebDriver test scripts, and run some.
· 3. Download BuildWise Server and Unzip it
· 4. Start up the BuildWise server
· 5. Create a build project
· 6. Run tests in CT Server

1. Install Ruby

It is quite easy to install Ruby on macOS and Linux, using its package manager such as brewon macOS and apt-get on Linux. I believe macOS/Linux users can get it done quite comfortably. By the way, macOS comes with Ruby 2.6.

Here I will just focus on the Ruby Windows installation. It is not hard either, thanks to the pre-packaged RubyInstaller for Windows.

Download a stable version

Unless you clearly know your choice, I would recommend: Ruby + DevKit 3.2.2–1 (x64), as indicated above.

Double-click the downloaded package(about 130MB in size) and run the installer.

Click the “Install” button. On the next page, make sure “MSYS2 development toolchain …” is selected.

Continue with installation. After about 2 minutes later, you will see this.

Make sure the checkbox is checked (don’t change), and click the “Finish” button. But it is not finished, MSYS2 is yet to be installed. Soon, you will be presented with a black window like below.

Just press the “ENTER” key. Wait a bit.

Press the ENTER key, Done!

To verify, start a new command window, type ruby --version followed by the ENTER key.

2. Get Sample Selenium WebDriver test scripts, and run some.

You surely have Git installed, right? If not, do it. (Windows users: run the installer; macOS/Linux users: you must know how, right?)

Start a command window (or terminal),

> cd c:\work
> git clone https://github.com/testwisely/buildwise-samples.git

There are several test projects (different languages/frameworks) under c:\work\buildwise-samples,

Run the below command to install the libraries to run one type of test script, Selenium + RSpec.

> cd c:\work\buildwise-samples\e2e-rspec-selenium
> install-lib.cmd

Run a sample test script to verify.

> cd c:\work\buildwise-samples\e2e-rspec-selenium
> rspec spec\login_spec.rb

If you have Chrome and its matching chromedriver installed, you shall see a test execution in a Chrome browser 😊!

If not, the most likely reason is that you don’t have chromedriver. Download it (here, selecting the version matching your Chrome) and put it chromedriver.exe into a folder in PATH, e.g. C:\Ruby32-x64\bin .

3. Download BuildWise Server and Unzip it

Install BuildWise server is as simple as “download and unzip”. Visit https://agileway.com.au/buildwise, and download the server as indicated.

The downloaded buildwise-2.3-x.zip is only 1.3MB.

Copy it to a folder, e.g. c:\agileway , right-click and unzip it there. In my case, a BuildWise server installed under c:\agileway\buildwise-2.3.2 . Easy, right?

4. Start up the BuildWise server

> cd C:\agileway\buildwise-2.3.2
> bundle

This will take a few minutes.

Once it is done, run `bundle-startup-demo.bat` (still in the command window/terminal) to start the server.

> cd C:\agileway\buildwise-2.3.2
> bundle-startup-demo.bat

For the first time, you will see a fair chunk of text passing by, that’s setting up the database. When you see the text below, the server is up and running.

Open http://localhost:3618 in your browser.

5. Create a build project

After login, Click the ‘Create a New project’ button.

For simplicity, I packaged some samples. For a selected framework combination, all build projects are pretty much the same. So, starting with a sample one is

For example, my test script use “Selenium + RSpec”, I chose the “Fill demo project” -> “RSpec”, as indicated below.

You will see some texts filled.

Astute readers will recognize this build project is to run the sample test projects we cloned earlier.

Click the “Create” button.

6. Run tests in CT Server

Click the “Build Now” button next to the newly created build project. Immediately, you will see something like this (called the build page, this is build #1)