Builder

Builder is a continuous integration tool with following design goals

• Text only configuration
• API / CLI as primary user interfaces
• Minimal functionality with maximal integrations to existing software
• Hackable, extensible web UI
• Seriously, executing a build should be nothing more than running a shell script in a controlled environment.

Getting started

1. Get builder. If you are on AMD64/Linux, you can just grab the latest binary:

curl -O https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/juhovuori/builder/builder

If not, you must build it yourself. The build process is a tiny bit
more complex than for a casual go project.

go get -d github.com/juhovuori/builder
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/juhovuori/builder
make build

Currently, builder only supports Unix-like operating systems.

2. Run builder server

./builder server -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/juhovuori/builder/master/builder.hcl

The above command runs builder with configuration that is used to build builder itself.
You must adjust the configuration to suit your project's needs.

3. Trigger a build. Find out what is the id of your configured project (the id is computed from the URL of your project configuration file):

curl http://localhost:8080/v1/projects

And trigger a build

curl -d '' http://localhost:8080/v1/projects/<projectid>/trigger

Now you should be good to go!

Configuration

Getting there...

Builder configuration

...

Project configuration

...

The build script

Before the build starts, the user defined build script is copied into build working directory as file script. That script is then started and it defines the build process.

The builder executable is guaranteed to be in path for the script, so that can be used to communicate with builder. E.g. a new build stage is added by echo my data | builder add-stage my-stage

Build finishes when the script finishes. If the script exits with status code 0, the build is considered a success. Otherwise its considered a failure.

Environment

BUILDER_BUILD_ID is the id of current build.

BUILDER_REPOSITORY is the local copy of the repository. This is used by builder clone. Do not mess with this directly! Fork executor would allow you to do so, but that will most deifinitely cause you trouble.

BUILDER_REPOSITORY_TYPE is the type of local repository

BUILDER_URL is the URL of builder server. This is used by builder client transparently.

PATH is a copy of PATH for builder server, prepended with the directory of builder executable. This way build script can just run build add-stage my-stage and so on to communicate with the server.

TODO ideas

• Build decision making:

  • store repository version in each build.
  • trigger => git pull
  • monitor repo dir and on change (or builder startup) => search for a build with current repo version, if not found start a build.
  • create build forces a new build

• websocket

• CLI

• Better logging

• stage ids

• stage subtypes

• Confirm thread safety

• support project configuration in builder.hcl

• Configuration refresh during trigger

• Notifications:

  • push notifications about build stage changes to other agents
  • github state api
  • http
  • something else?

• RESTify API. IDs => URLs, etc.

• Execution managers

  • executor pools
  • build queues.
  • environment creation here instead of app

• Query executors

• ability to build without version-data

• Tokens

  • build token

• ProjectID instead of string, etc.

• Organization manager

  • provides a web interface for creating organisations and running builder for each org

• API endpoint for stats

  • configurable?

• Basic web UI

• Web UI plugins for displaying standard build stages such as go coverprofile

• Web UI plugins for displaying repository related info

• => docker

• => nomad-dev-setup