CI platform
The Node.js CI platform is available at http://jenkins.nodejs.org. As its name suggests, this URL represents a Jenkins server to which Jenkins agents connect and provide resources to run build and test jobs.
This CI platform is responsible, among other things, for building release artefacts and integrating changes into the codebase. As a result, it is a critical piece of the project's infrastructure.
Currently, the main jobs that are running on this CI platform are:
-
nodejs-release. It produces Node.js releases' artefacts such as binary and source packages.
-
node-accept-pull-request. It takes care of integrating any change into joyent/node's repository.
-
node-review. This job is mainly used when working on a large set of changes to do a pre-validation of some work before going through the normal contribution process to integrate that change.
These jobs are usually meta-jobs that contain several sub-jobs. For instance, the nodejs-release job contains the following sub-jobs: nodejs-btar, nodejs-indep and nodejs-msi.
Sometimes, clones of these jobs exist and have slightly different names. Most of the times the names of these clone jobs use suffixes to differentiate themselves from the original jobs.
For instance, there's another meta-job named nodejs-release-julien that is a clone of the [nodejs-release](http://jenkins.nodejs.org/job /nodejs-release/) job. The difference between the two jobs is that nodejs-release-julien pulls code from Julien's fork of joyent/node instead of from joyent/node directly, and that it uploads release artefacts to Julien's account on one of the build machines.
In this case, the same functionality could and should be achieved by using jobs parameters, but in other cases cloning an existing job is a good way to experiment with modifications without breaking existing behavior on which other users of the CI platform rely.
This job is currently used for two use cases:
-
Doing an actual development, stable or maintenance release.
-
Creating release artefacts from any branch. For instance, you might want to create packages that are easy to install to give them to end users so that they can test some changes that haven't made it into an official release yet.
It is composed of three distinct sub-jobs:
-
nodejs-btar which is responsible for building binary tarballs for all UNIX platforms currently supported (SmartOS, Linux and OSX).
-
nodejs-indep which creates both the source tarball and the API documentation tarball.
-
nodejs-msi which creates the Windows installers and binaries.
In order to trigger a build of the nodejs-release job, point your browser to jenkins.nodejs.org/job/nodejs-release and click on Build with parameters. On that page you'll be asked to fill in three text fields that correspond to the following parameters:
-
GIT_BRANCH: the branch of the joyent/node repository to use to checkout the source code to build.
-
INT_SIGN: the identifier of a key to use to sign the OSX binary installer. This is not needed because OSX package signing doesn't work on CI machines currently.
-
APP_SIGN: the identifier of a key to use to sign the OSX application. This is not needed because OSX package signing doesn't work on CI machines currently.
Node that when doing an actuall official release, the creation of the OSX binary installer must be done from
To access Windows machines, you will need to connect to them using the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). There are RDP clients for most operating systems.
For other administration tasks, such as resetting platform, you should log in to the Azure portal.
The informations needed to connect to these machines via RDP or to the Azure portal should have been sent to you if you're an administrator of the CI platform. Otherwise, send an email to [email protected].
Administration of UNIX CI machines is done via SSH. All UNIX machines, except OSX ones, are VMs or containers hosted on Joyent's Public cloud. If you're an administrator of the CI platform, you must have received a login/password to access a management dashboard on Joyent's Public Cloud from which you can:
- Manage existing build machines.
- Create new build machines.
- Delete existing build machines. Be very careful though before delete any build machine, and make sure you get the approval from the rest of the administrators of the CI platform before proceeding.
From this management dashboard, you can also get the public IP address of any of the build machines and use SSH to get access to a remote shell.
OSX machines are not hosted in a cloud platform. Instead, they are actual physical machines with a public IP. Currently, there is only one such machine and it's hosted at Joyent's offices. To connect to this machine, you will need to:
- Connect to Joyent's VPN.
- Use SSH to get a shell on that machine.
If you're an administrator of the CI platform and you need access to the OSX build machine, contact [email protected] and all the required information will be sent to you by email.
