Setting buildbot up a-la-releng (Create your own local masters and slaves)

buildbot is what Mozilla's Release Engineering uses to run the infrastructure behind tbpl.mozilla.org.
buildbot assigns jobs to machines (aka slaves) through hosts called buildbot masters.

All the different repositories and packages needed to setup buildbot are installed through Puppet and I'm not aware of a way of setting my local machine through Puppet (I doubt I would want to do that!).
I managed to set this up a while ago by hand [1][2] (it was even more complicated in the past!), however, these one-off attempts were not easy to keep up-to-date and isolated.

I recently landed few scripts that makes it trivial to set up as many buildbot environments as you want and all isolated from each other.

All the scripts have been landed under the "community" directory under the "braindump" repository:
https://hg.mozilla.org/build/braindump/file/default/community

The main two scripts:

• create_community_slaves_and_masters.sh
• It creates a build, try and test masters under a directory called "masters"
• It creates a build, try and test slaves under a directory called "slaves"
• setup_buildbot_environment.sh
• It checkouts all repositories needed ([3, 4, 5, 6, 7]) under the "repos" directory
• It creates a virtualenv under the "venv" directory

If you call create_community_slaves_and_masters.sh with -w /path/to/your/own/workdir you will have everything set up for you. From there on, all you would have to do is this:

• cd /path/to/your/own/workdir
• source venv/bin/activate
• buildbot start masters/test_master (for example)
• buildslave start slaves/test_slave

Each paired master and slave have been setup to talk to each other.

I hope this is helpful for people out there. It's been great for me when I contribute patches for buildbot (bug 791924).

As always in Mozilla, contributions are always welcome!

PS 1 = Only tested on Ubuntu. If you want it to port this to other platforms please let me know and I can give you a hand.

PS 2 = I know that there is a repository that has docker images called "tupperware", however, I had these set of scripts being worked on for a while. Perhaps someone wants to figure out how to set a similar process through the docker images.

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