[Python-Dev] buildbot (original) (raw)

Brian Warner warner at lothar.com
Mon Jan 9 02:38:10 CET 2006

From: "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de>

So at the moment, I'm quite happy with buildbot. My only wish is that it would do static pages, rather than being a web server. I set it up as a reverse proxy (so nobody knows what the port number is, but still).

As a bit of history, the buildbot's predecessor used static pages.. it just dumped everything into HTML files any time something changed, and then I pointed apache at the directory containing these files. By the time I started the current Buildbot project, I had become familiar with Twisted, and elected to use its built-in web server to provide status information. This makes it much easier to implement things like the "Force Build" button, and allows the same status-retrieving API to be used by all the different status-delivery modules: web, IRC, email, PB. On the other hand, it makes it slightly harder to merge the buildbot's web space into that of another web server (unless that other web server also happens to be Twisted: the buildbot can run as a twisted.web.distrib sub-server, which is how the Twisted buildbot presents status).

The reverse proxy is a great way to improve the integration of the buildbot's web pages into the rest of your site's. I'm hoping to improve the web-status plugin to make it easier to change around the page layout from the buildbot side, but even with that you'll want the reverse-proxy to remove the port-number from the URL.

I should mention a feature that you might find useful: you can add some query arguments to the top-level Waterfall page's URL to restrict the set of Builders that are displayed. If you append "?show=full-2.3", you'll wind up with a waterfall display that only contains the "full-2.3" Builder's column. Appending "?show=full-2.3&show=full-2.4" will show two columns, etc. You can also create multiple Waterfall instances, each with a different set of "categories", and use that to manage the complexity of displaying status for lots of Builders. (with the current release these multiple Waterfalls must all listen on different TCP ports, unfortunately, but you can always hide this with the reverse-proxy's URL mapping).

So you could have one page that shows all the builders, and another set of pages that only show specific ones (perhaps one primary builder for each architecture). If the reverse-proxy or some sort of Apache URL-rewriting allows you to add query parameters to the target URLs, you might be able to hide these filtered views behind simple-looking status URLs.

It's not the greatest solution, but it might let you add more Builders without making the display unworkably complex.

cheers, -Brian

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