How to create local buildbot slaves

For the longest time I have wished for *some* documentation on how to setup a buildbot slave outside of the Release Engineering setup and not needing to go through the Puppet manifests.

On a previous post, I've documented how to setup a production buildbot master.
In this post, I'm only covering the slaves side of the setup.

Install buildslave

virtualenv ~/venvs/buildbot-slave
source ~/venvs/buildbot-slave/bin/activate
pip install zope.interface==3.6.1
pip install buildbot-slave==0.8.4-pre-moz2 --find-links http://pypi.pub.build.mozilla.org/pub
pip install Twisted==10.2.0
pip install simplejson==2.1.3

NOTE: You can figure out what to install by looking in here: http://hg.mozilla.org/build/puppet/file/ad32888ce123/modules/buildslave/manifests/install/version.pp#l19

Create the slaves

NOTE: I already have build and test master in my localhost with ports 9000 and 9001 respecively.

buildslave create-slave /builds/build_slave localhost:9000 bld-linux64-ix-060 pass
buildslave create-slave /builds/test_slave localhost:9001 tst-linux64-ec2-001 pass

Start the slaves

On a normal day, you can do this to start your slaves up:

 source ~/venvs/buildbot-slave/bin/activate
 buildslave start /builds/build_slave
 buildslave start /builds/test_slave

---

This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Technical debt and getting rid of the elephants

Recently, I had to deal with code where I knew there were elephants in the code and I did not want to see them. Namely, adding a new build platform (mulet) and running a b2g desktop job through mozharness on my local machine.

As I passed by, I decided to spend some time to go and get some peanuts to get at least few of those elephants out of there:

• Remove the need to touch three repositories to add one build job
• Add the ability to run a b2g desktop mochitest with mozharness without having to loan a releng machine
• What convention to use for developer-focused mozharness configs?

I know I can't use "the elephant in the room" metaphor like that but I just did and you just know what I meant :)

Well, how do you deal with technical debt?

Do you take a chunk every time you pass by that code?

Do you wait for the storm to pass by (you've shipped your awesome release) before throwing the elephants off the ship?

Or else?

Let me know; I'm eager to hear about your own de-elephantization stories.

---

This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Do you need a used Mac Mini for your Mozilla team? or your non-for-profit project?

If so, visit this form and fill it up by May 22nd (9 days from today).
There are a lot of disclaimers in the form. Please read them carefully.

Main ones:

• The Minis are in Santa Clara, California
• You will have to arrange the pick up or order enough
• They come without operating system
• You have to take care of buying and installing it
• Remember: Linux can run on them; you will have to figure it out

These minis have been deprecated after 4 years of usage. Read more about it in here.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Mini

UPDATE: Highlighted a couple of disclaimers

---

This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Releng goodies from Portlandia!

Last week, Mozilla's Release Engineering met at the Portland office for a team week.

The week was packed with talks and several breakout sessions.

We recorded a lot of our sessions and put all of them in here for your enjoyment! (with associated slide decks if applicable).

Here's a brief list of the talks you can find:

• RelEng 2014: Where are we? Where are we going? (only slides)
• TaskCluster
• Merge day, train model & repositories (rather intense!)
• OpenStack & automated provisioning
• The Tup build system
• RelEng's strategy
• RelengAPI

Follow us at @MozReleng and Planet Releng.

Many thanks to jlund to help me record it all.

UPDATE: added thanks to jlund.

The Releng dreams are alive in Portland

---

This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.