About

This is a tool for viewing CI build status from multiple CI servers and projects. It's a second iteration of our internal tools at auctionet and is in daily use.

We run it on heroku. The instructions are not complete, but it should not be hard to figure out what's needed to set up your own (this is basically just a simple rails app).

How it looks

Each commit shows up as its own line, the newest at the top. Within each line boxes are shown for the different builds run on that revision.

The build names are links to the status_url passed in when reporting builds. At barsoom we pass in a link to the jenkins build result console. This way we can easily get to any build result of any recent revision.

Web UI

Visit https://ci-pipeline.herokuapp.com/?pw=PASSWORD, finding the actual PASSWORD in Heroku config: h config:get WEB_PASSWORD -a ci-pipeline

API

The api token is set with the API_TOKEN environment variable.

Build status API

Example client for CircleCI (just a wrapper around curl, can easily be adapted for other CI tools as well).

Build status is reported to /api/build_status as a POST with the following attributes:

• token: The api token.
• name: The name of the build (e.g. foo_tests or foo_deploy). The app assumes that each build has a unique name. You use mappings configured for each project to display short names as in the screenshot.
• repository: The repository path (e.g. git@github...).
• revision: The git revision.
• status_url: The url to link to for showing build results.
• status: Current build status, can be building, successful or failed.

Normally the client would first post with the status of building and then either successful or failed after the build is done.

Project status webhook

A webhook to receive the current project build status. Useful for displaying the current build status on dashboards.

Set the WEBHOOK_URLS config variable to the URLs (space-separated) where you want the project build status posted (as the JSON encoded parameter "payload").

The payload looks like this:

{
  "project_name": "pipeline",
  "project_removed": false,
  "latest_revisions": [
    {
      "hash": "ea75a9c817757f1ebe09be035c807b7fe23499a0",
      "short_name": "ea75a9",
      "builds": [
        {
          "name": "tests",
          "status": "building"
        },
        {
          "name": "deploy",
          "status": "pending"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

The webhook will only be called once and it will wait no longer than 10 seconds. It does not delay the /api/build_status call since it runs in a thread.

The status_url (link to your CI server) is intentionally excluded for now for security reasons (and because we haven't needed it yet). If you want this feature, open an issue or send a pull request.

The build status: can be one of: "pending", "building", "successful", "failed" and "fixed".

Project API

Removing a project

DELETE /api/projects/:name?token=...

Build locking API

NOTE: Experimental feature

Builds can be locked so that only one build with a specific name can run at a time. This can be useful if you have a CI server that isn't capable of doing this by itself (like CircleCI) and you for example don't want it to try and deploy to different versions of the same app at the same time.

A build is locked by posting to /api/build/lock with the following attributes:

• name: The name of the build.
• repository: The repository path (e.g. git@github...).
• revision: The revision that you wish to lock.

The response contains the revision currently holding the lock, and looks like { "locked_by_revision": "foo" }. Locks will remove themselves after 30 minutes just in case something went wrong, but you should try and ensure that unlocking happens as nobody wants to wait that long.

A build is unlocked by posting to /api/build/unlock with the following attributes:

• name: The name of the build.
• repository: The repository path (e.g. git@github...).
• revision: The revision that you wish to unlock.

ENVs

To run the app in production you need to set a few envs.

heroku config:set WEB_PASSWORD=your-password-here
heroku config:set SECRET_KEY_BASE=$(rake secret)

By default builds will go from "building" to "pending" after 60 minutes as some builds may have been killed in a bad way where the final status was never reported. You can change this time like this:

# heroku config:set BUILD_TIMEOUT_IN_MINUTES=120

You can limit the amount of revisions, to keep the database size manageable:

# heroku config:set REVISIONS_TO_KEEP=1000

REVISIONS_TO_KEEP defaults to 500.

Running the tests

You need postgres installed.

script/bootstrap

rake              # all tests
rake spec:unit    # unit tests
rake spec         # integrated tests

Download production data

rake app:reset

Development notes

The project controller has a before_action for projects

before_action :get_projects

This is needed for the navigation.

TODO

Various things we could do later.

• Add CircleCI support if they improve their webhooks
• Add build reporting script
  • possibly built in go so that it is simple to install, no deps on ruby or similar
• Add heroku deploy instructions, look at gridlook
• Make a new screenshot
• Be able to manually trigger builds in CI. Probably some kind of plugin-API.
• Possibly make it possible to view one project at a time, or the latest results from all projects in a compact view.
• Custom urls configurable for projects, possibly driven by custom data in build status?
• Show fixed status for builds when a later revision fixes a build [see fixed_status branch]
• Keep updates around instead of changing builds existing? Would be nice for statistics.
• Support for custom badges, etc. Like codeclimate.
• Explore using it do manage continuous deployment pipelines better and simpler than can be done with jenkins plugins.
• Stats: averge build times, estimated time left, time from commit to deploy, average number of commits per deploy, ...
• Integrate with the commit status API https://github.com/blog/1227-commit-status-api
  • Report a commit status as an aggregate of several builds. Ex: Green if units, integration and staging is green.
  • Seems like it only supports showing status on pull requests though.