Bitten Build Configurations

The content on this page is maintained as part of default documentation - see Documentation/configure.html

While build recipes tell a slave what is to be built (and how), build configurations are the means by which the build master is informed about what needs to be built.

A build configuration is composed of:

• a name used as identifier, a “pretty” name for display, as well as a description that may contain wiki formatting,
• a flag to temporarily or permanently deactivate builds of that tree,
• a path (or branch name) that identifies the subset of the repository that should be built,
• a build recipe for the configuration, and
• a list of target platforms (see next section).

Target platforms

A target platform is something like “NetBSD on x86” or “Win32 with Java 1.4”.

Technically, a target platform is a named set of rules against which the properties of build slaves are matched. Each rule is a regular expression matching a particular slave property, such as the operating system or the processor. When a slave connects to the build master, it sends a registration message that includes information about the slave.

A build configuration must have at least one target platform assigned to it before it becomes fully active.

Slave Properties

By default, the following properties are included:

family

The basic type of operating system, typically “posix” for Unix-like systems and “nt” for Win32 systems.

os

The name of the operating system (for example “Darwin”, “Linux” or “Windows”).

version

The operating system version.

machine

The hardware platform (for example “i686” or “Power Macintosh”).

processor

The processor architecture (for example “athlon” or “powerpc”).

Note that not all of these properties may be available for all platforms. For example, the machine and processor properties are currently empty for build slaves running on Windows. Additional properties can be set up on the slave side using a configuration file.

You can get what these properties is by following command:

bitten-slave <url> -v -k -n

You'll get some string like

[DEBUG]  Sending slave configuration:\
 <slave name="mypc"><platform processor="sparc">sun4u</platform>\
<os version="2.8" family="posix">Solaris</os></slave>

Note the platform sun4u is the machine property.

Examples

So to set up a target platform, you create rules that are checked against the properties of the slave. For example, a target platform that matches slave running Linux on x86 would look like this:

Property	Expression
os	^Linux
machine	^[xi]\d?86$

A target platform that matches any slaves running on Windows might look like this:

Property	Expression
family	^nt$

The build master will request a build from at most one slave for every target platform. So, for example, if there are three slaves connected that are running NetBSD on x86, only one of them will perform the build of a specific revision. Slaves that match a particular target platform are treated as if they were completely interchangable.

If a slave connects that doesn't match any of the configured target platforms, the build master will reject its registration.