Runner

Runner is a project that manages starting tasks in a defined order. If tasks fail, the chain can be retried, or halted.

Configuration

Configuration is done with INI style configuration files.

[runner] section

Keys:

• sleep_time: how long to wait between retries
• max_tries: how many times to retry before giving up
• halt_task: which task to run to "halt" the process. This could perhaps shut the machine down or terminate the EC2 instance
• max_time: maximum amount of time a task can run

[env] section

Keys and values in this section are passed into tasks as environment variables

other sections

Configuration for other tasks or purposes can go into their own sections.

Tasks

Tasks are loaded from a task dir. Tasks are run as separate processes.

The return code of a task determines what happens next.

Return code 0 means everything went well, and to continue on to the next task.

Return code 2 means to run the "halt" task, and then stop running tasks and exit runner

Other return codes will cause runner to retry tasks from the beginning.

A special environment variable, "RUNNER_CONFIG_CMD" is always set in the environment that allows tasks to easily access configuration. e.g.

$RUNNER_CONFIG_CMD -g hg.remote

will return the "remote" configuration variable from the "hg" section

Tests

Tests are run via nose Run python setup.py nosetests, or nose manually

Runner also uses doctests Run python -m doctest -v runner.py

TODO

• implement tasks
• exponential backoff for sleep time
• ccache cleanup (tmp files)
• repo cleanup (old *.git files)
• check slavealloc (changed master?)