Modeling Project Releng/Building/Scheduled Builds

Using a website or shell script for building too much work? Well, thanks to bug 207007 you can now set up builds to run on a schedule.

By default, a build will only run if there's anything new in CVS to merit a build. This can be overridden such that a build will ALWAYS run at a given time using the -nosearchcvs flag.

Example

Say you want to run 5 builds back-to-back and have each one grab the latest, starting at 6pm and running until about 7:15pm.

Login to your build server, then add this to apache's crontab using sudo -u apache crontab -e to edit it.

# U/O/QTV N builds 00 18 * * 2 /home/www-data/build/modeling/scripts/start_cron.sh -sub uml2 -regex "[ISR]200.*/eclipse-SDK-|[ISR]200.*/emf-sdo-xsd-SDK-" -basebuilderBranch M5_34 -nosearchcvs > $HOME/cron_logs/start_cron.sh.uml2.N.txt 2>&1 25 18 * * 2 /home/www-data/build/modeling/scripts/start_cron.sh -sub ocl -regex "[ISR]200.*/eclipse-SDK-|[ISR]200.*/emf-sdo-xsd-SDK-|[ISR]200.*/mdt-uml2-SDK|orbit" -basebuilderBranch M5_34 -nosearchcvs > $HOME/cron_logs/start_cron.sh.ocl.N.txt 2>&1 40 18 * * 2 /home/www-data/build/modeling/scripts/start_cron.sh -sub query -regex "[ISR]200.*/eclipse-SDK-|[ISR]200.*/emf-sdo-xsd-SDK-|[S]200.*mdt-ocl-SDK-" -basebuilderBranch M5_34 -nosearchcvs > $HOME/cron_logs/start_cron.sh.query.N.txt 2>&1 50 18 * * 2 /home/www-data/build/modeling/scripts/start_cron.sh -sub validation -regex "[ISR]200.*/eclipse-SDK-|[ISR]200.*emf-sdo-xsd-SDK-|[S]200.*mdt-ocl-SDK-" -basebuilderBranch M5_34 -nosearchcvs > $HOME/cron_logs/start_cron.sh.validation.N.txt 2>&1 00 19 * * 2 /home/www-data/build/modeling/scripts/start_cron.sh -sub transaction -regex "[ISR]200.*/eclipse-SDK-|[ISR]200.*/emf-sdo-xsd-SDK-|[ISR]200.*/emf-validation-SDK-" -basebuilderBranch M5_34 -nosearchcvs > $HOME/cron_logs/start_cron.sh.transaction.N.txt 2>&1

See also:

• crontab for apache@emft.eclipse.org
• crontab for www-data@emf.torolab.ibm.com
• crontab for nickb@emf.torolab.ibm.com

Specifying Dependencies

You can specify dependencies using either the -deps or the -regex flag (details below). Or, you can set a regex pattern in your build page's _common.php, which allows your build page to be automatically filtered to preselect only the most recent dependencies for your build.

For maintenance builds, you may need to use the -d flag to hardcode values to be used. If you use a pattern match, you may build your maintenance branch using HEAD branch dependencies (eg., for an Eclipse 3.4-based maintenance, you should not be using Eclipse 3.5). See start_cron.sh for examples.

You can also combine hard coded deps with regex matched ones; for example, you could state the exact version of Eclipse to use, but then pattern match for -regex "M200.*/eclipse-SDK-" to find any newer maintenance builds.

More Info

Noteworthy flags include:

• Specifying dependencies:

• -deps: specify a comma-separated list of dependencies by shortname (eg., -deps emf,ocl,query)
• -regex: specify the regular expresssion(s) to use when looking in /home/www-data/build/requests/dependencies.txt for dependencies to use; more control than -deps

• Testing / auditing

• -preview: don't actually run a build, just echo the command for preview (for testing your regular expressions)
• -listDeps: if used, list the contents of the dependencies file instead of running a build.

• Overrides

• -noSearchCVS: don't check Search CVS for updates and just do a build
• -basebuilderBranch: specify the basebuilder branch to use

• Workflow

• -addSDK: when the build completes, the URL for that build will be added to /home/www-data/build/requests/dependencies.txt so that other builds can use it as a dependency.

Additional options and flags are documented in the shell script, start_cron.sh.

Scheduled Releases (Promoting Automatically)

Clicking a button on a website too much work? Well, you can also schedule your promotes to happen automatically too.

See Scheduled Releases.