Previously I have written about using Hudson to perform pre-flights using branches on source control systems; but sometimes you just have a patch file that you want to run your tests against.

It turns out this can be quite simple, you just need to make use of a job parameter that takes a File as it's input, this is then written to the specified location in the workspace. In my example I have the following two parameters, the Title allow me to name the job and this property is picked up later by the job Description plugin.

Once you know where the patch is located you can just apply the patch before you perform the required build steps, here is an example using SVN so we use the unix patch command, git users can use the git command instead for this.

And there you are, you can test a user submitted patch for testing without tying up your development machine. You can also run the tests more than once to check for any intermittent tests which can be very valuable in concurrent environments.