Week [1] - Learning to set up Buildbot

Okay, it's time for another update as to my activities in MV.

By the time Robcee left last Friday to go back to the picturesque province of New Brunswick, I had come pretty close to having Buildbot installed and ready to be deployed on my CentOS VM.

Today in between wrestling with trying to build on Vista with VC9 (I must remember to "run as administrator" on the mozilla-build shell) I have been learning to deploy my own local buildbot master and a linux slave.

In getting to this:


there were a couple of roadblocks.

1. The current master.cfg and mozbuild.py are written for Builbot 0.7.5 and so I had to make a couple of small changes as per the documentation to account for import changes (no more step, using steps.shell or just steps instead) and also html.Waterfall is deprecated we should use html.WebStatus now.

2. It took a little while to figure out that the "force build" option that you can get when you click on a slave's name link in the waterfall is actually an option passed in to html.Waterfall as in html.Waterfall(http_port=2005, allowForce="true") and this gives you a nice little html form where you can force a build as you need one.

3. The last little glitch was just making sure that all the names matched up. The major lesson learned here was: Never follow directions. Just because someone says to do

buildbot create-slave slave localhost:9989 linux mozilla 

doesn't mean that will work. You have to look beyond the literal instructions and realize that the slave name must match what is in auth.py and same with the password.

Next goal - learn how to kick unittest machines when they misbehave.