Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Buildbot Part I - Setting Up

Buildbot is a Python-based continuous integration system that consists of a buildmaster and one or more buildslaves, you can check it out on github.

The buildmaster decides what, when and how the system is build, it has a configuration file called master.cfg where the build process is defined. On the other hand, the buildslaves handle the execution of the commands and return results to the master.

The following is a graph (from buildbot’s wiki) shows buildbot architecture supported repositories and notifiers.

buildbot

Setting up


To setup on windows, the master and slaves require:
Additionally, master requires:
Install buildbotmaster (http://buildbot.googlecode.com/files/buildbot-0.8.6p1.tar.gz) and buildbotslave (http://buildbot.googlecode.com/files/buildbot-slave-0.8.6p1.tar.gz)

For this example, I installed both on same machine, if the installation went ok you should be able to check their versions:

buildbotsetup

The following steps creates and starts the master and slave:

Create BuildbotMaster

C:\Python27\Scripts>buildbot create-master -r C:\BuildMaster

Create BuildbotSlave

C:\Python27\Scripts>buildslave create-slave C:\BuildSlave localhost:9989 BuildSlave01 mysecretpwd

Start BuildbotMaster

C:\Python27\Scripts>buildbot start c:\BuildMaster

Start BuildbotSlave

C:\Python27\Scripts>buildslave start c:\BuildSlave

if everything went fine you should see a page like the following:

buildbotpage

You can check for errors on C:\BuildMaster\twistd.log and C:\BuildSlave\twistd.log.

Who is using buildbot:  Python, Mozilla, Google Chromium and others. The following shows Python 2.7 waterfall page:

PythonBuildbot

On my next post I’ll show you how to run automated builds and tests for a .net application hosted on git/codeplex using buildbot.