Scheduled / Time based builds

[rosstimson]

A common type of build for me is often triggered by time rather than on commits. It would be great if this could be supported.

In the meantime I'll look into using the drone command / client with cron in order to achieve this.

[rosstimson]

Just an aside to this, I've just run a drone build in my project and I noticed that the it is not picked up in the web front-end. Is there a way to persuade the front-end into seeing manual builds or shall I add a separate issue / feature request for this?

[bradrydzewski]

drine build is meant to run the build locally, so that you can test on your own machine without a server.

You could trigger builds by recreating the github json payload and trigger the hook URL with curl.

[rosstimson]

I think Drone detects that a particular payload has already been processed and throws a 500 when you try the same one twice. I envsiaged having a modified json payload for generic cron based builds but I now don't think this will work.

However, in the meantime, I have got around this by just using a cron job to append a timestamp into a file and commit it back to a scheduled_builds git branch. It is a bit messy but it is a quick fix for now.

I'd still like to see a time based build option available in Drone longer term.

[bradrydzewski]

we added a new REST api to our 0.3 branch:
https://github.com/bradrydzewski/drone/tree/exp

This will allow you to re-build a commit, and avoid having to append timestamps via cron just to trigger builds. There is no plan to add scheduling directly to Drone, however, the purpose of the API is so that it can be extended for such purposes.

Still a bit of work to do, but you can track API code here:
https://github.com/bradrydzewski/drone/tree/exp/client/command