What is chkbuild?

chkbuild is a tool that automatically compiles software from its latest source code on a regular schedule and produces web pages showing the results. It was built primarily for the Ruby programming language, and it helps developers track whether the latest code changes still compile cleanly or whether something broke. At a high level, you set it up to fetch the newest code from a version control system like Git or Subversion, then it compiles everything and records what happened, including warnings, errors, and other output, as HTML pages you can browse. A few things make it stand out: if a build hangs, a configurable timeout will kill it so it doesn't run forever. If the build crashes and produces a core dump, chkbuild automatically captures a backtrace (a diagnostic snapshot of what went wrong) so developers can investigate. It also compares each build's output to the previous run, filtering out expected differences like timestamps, so you can quickly spot what actually changed. Older build records are compressed to save disk space. The main audience is Ruby developers and project maintainers who want to keep an eye on the health of the latest code across different Ruby versions and branches. For example, the Ruby project itself uses this kind of setup at rubyci.org to publicly track whether builds are passing or failing. A team maintaining any software project could use it to get early warning when a new commit breaks the build, before users hit the problem. The setup is fairly involved: you create a dedicated system user account for security (since you're compiling untrusted code that could theoretically be tampered with), configure a web server to serve the compressed HTML output, and schedule regular runs via a cron job. You can optionally publish results to a remote server using file synchronization tools. The README emphasizes running chkbuild under an isolated user account, not your personal one, because compiling code from a remote server carries real risk if that server were ever compromised. Configuration is done by writing Ruby scripts, and the project includes sample configurations for building Ruby itself.