Using buildbot at SysGrove
BuildBot (http://buildbot.net/) is a framework created to simplify the development of automation solutions in the field of software development. Unlike other systems such as Jenkins (http://jenkins-ci.org/) or TravisCI (https://travis-ci.org/) buildbot only provides a framework on which to build the infrastructure that you need . The project has client-server architecture where the server sends to the client the work to be performed, the server is called master and the clients are called slaves; the framework supports multiple masters and multiple slaves, in this way the system architecture can easily grow with the needs of your project. Buildbot is available for virtually any platform, even if the current version 0.8.x platform support win32-64 is not exactly the best though still usable with some changes (see http://trac.buildbot.net/wiki/RunningBuildbotOnWindows )
Buildbot at sysgrove
For our development needs in SysGrove( http://sysgrove.com) buildbot is used to generate the release of our application for the win32 platform. Every 12 hours we verify that there are some changes in our repository (https://bitbucket.org/sysgrove/sysgrove) and in this case, the following operations are performed: - Download the project from the repository (we use git, but the system supports hg, svn, bazaar etc ...) - Launch the test suite (in this case we use the testing tool discovery nosetests) - Generate the executable using py2exe - Build the initial database (sqlite and postgres) - It creates the archive with the application executable and test database(s) - Load the new release on "Confluence"
Clearly doing all these steps manually is tedious and can beprone to errors or oversights that would decrease the quality of our product.
Our setup
As mentioned at the beginning we (http://sysgrove.com/) need to create an executable for the platform win32 (and possibly in the future for linux and osx) for which we need to run our script inside a win32 OS; given the relative difficulty of configuring a master on windows it was decided to have the master in a linux host (debian jessie) and a slave in a virtual machine with windows 7 ™ since that the slaves give far fewer problems .
Configuration
The configuration file, as with cfg extension, is a simple python script, you can use this file to configure these main areas: - Slaves: you can define how many slaves you want each with its own identity - The scheduler: the scheduler indicate how and when the activities will be planned by the master - The builder: indicate the steps to take to create a build - Notifiers: the master can communicate in many ways the status of the build such as irc, email or web - Various configurations such as the database to use to store the state of the system, the identity of the project (name, url) etc.
Pitfalls
As I said earlier I had some problems with windows, probably due to my inexperience with the version of python for this operating system. One of the first difficulty concerns sqlalchemy, an ORM for python; buildbot requires in fact a version of sqlalchemy == 0.7.10 as our application requires a newer version. Typically, such a problem is solved easily using the handy tool virtualenv (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/virtualenv) creating an environment for the master (the part that needs access to a db, sqlite by default) and one environment for the slave, but given my experience with windows, I could not separate the environments (which is why the master is on a debian host and the slave is a on windows VM).
Conclusions
Once you understand the general concepts of buildbot, extend and customize the functionality becomes simply a work of configuring and creating scripts that do the real work, besides the web interface by default enables us to keep track of our builds and forcing new if it were needed.
Clearly this is not a "point and click" tool to everyone and this is a good thing, in my humble opinion and responsibility for the maintenance of such a system requires knowledge of a typical IT department and not a manager who, if desired, can always send us an email to request a build rather than messing around with his hands no expert ;)