Buildserver Setup Instructions

This page holds the instructions of setting up your very own instance of the embEDUx buildserver. For advanced users, these instructions may be considered mere suggestions. We'd be happy to receive suggestions and feedback about this!

Requirements

Adminstation setup completed - If you haven't already setup your Adminstation, please follow these instructions.

Buildserver Machine Requirements

Hardware

HW-Component	Requirement
CPU	x86_64 multicore - the more cores the better ;)
RAM	1GB per supported target architecture
Storage	10GB for initial full builds - min. 20GB suggested
Connectivity	Initial downloads of ~800-1000MiB

Software

Tested Operating Systems

The machines must have a recent distribution of Linux installed. Currently the setup routine supports Ubuntu Linux 14.04 Ubuntu Linux 14.10 * Gentoo Linux with a Docker compatible Kernel Configuration

Other Linux Distributions might work too if they use apt or portage as their package manager. Please share your experiences!

Installed Packages

Please make sure that these packages are installed and properly setup on the buildserver machine.

SSH Server - the setup routine controls the buildserver via SSH

User Permissions

You either need root-access on the buildserver, or a user that has permissions to run arbitrary commands with sudo.

Allow SSH access via key authentication - the setup routine and the instructions on the page assume that you are using key-based authentication for the user you chose in the host details.

Suggestions

Understand the Implementation Details

Configure the hosts details

After cd-ing into the buildserver-setuproutine directory, please set the host's address and the SSH login.

$ $EDITOR host_vars/master

host address - Change the value of the variable ansible_ssh_host to the address of the machine where you want to have the buildserver running on.
SSH Login Username - Change the value of ansible_ssh_user to either root or to a user that can use sudo. This is necessary for the installation of dependencies, and in case you have apparmor installed, set it to complain mode for docker before the container builds are started.

Creating the password vault

Authentication details that will be used between the buildserver components and for accessing the web-interface will be stored in a so called vault file. It takes only a few steps to created the vault using the ansible-vault-utility.

Starting in the buildserver-setuproutine repository directory, the password file can be created using the ansible-vault utility.

$ cd ${BULDSERVER-SETUP-REPO} $ ansible-vault create group_vars/vault.yml

Either $EDITOR or vim as fallback will open and present you with an empty file. Now create a simple YAML variable named buildbot_psk and assign it your desired password. In addition, create a YAML dictionary called users, which contains a user: password mapping for allowed logins on the buildmaster's webinterface. Here's an example:
```
---
buildbot_psk: your_secret_psk
users:
    embedux: embedux
```
Save and exit the file. Excellent!

You can come back and make changes to the vault file at any time using the following command.

$ ansible-vault edit group_vars/vault.yml

Install the dependencies and the buildserver components

The next step is to install the needed dependencies on the configured hosts. Once the dependencies were installed the actual buildserver infrastructure is ready to be installed. The buildserver.yml playbook will take care of both. Depending on your configured architectures and the speed of your internet connection and system components, this might take a couple of hours.

$ ansible-playbook -i hosts buildserver.yml --ask-sudo-pass --ask-vault-pass -e @group_vars/vault.yml --tags all

Check the Web-Interface

After the installation has completed, you should be able to reach the Webinterface at http://<buildserver-IP>:8010. Additionally, you should be able to login with the user-password combinations you've stored in the vault file.