Automatic Builds of GlueX Software

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Revision as of 10:20, 13 June 2017 by Marki (Talk | contribs) (Nightly Build: update for parallel builds on four platforms)

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Nightly Build

Every night a complete build of the source directory is done on several platforms at the lab.

  • The builds are located in the directory /u/scratch/gluex/nightly on the JLab CUE. Everyday a new directory, named by date, is created in this directory, for example, /u/scratch/gluex/nightly/2014-10-03. In turn there is a separate directory created for each platform, e. g., Linux_RHEL7-x86_64-gcc4.8.3.
  • Since the scratch disk cleaning job deletes files unread for more than two weeks, builds older than that cannot be used.
  • The HDDS, and sim-recon packages are built. Latest versions of each are used.
  • The script run is /home/gluex/bin/nightly.sh. It is scheduled as a cron job for the "gluex" account on jlabl5.jlab.org. The job runs at midnight daily.
  • Tne cron job on runs the builds on the various platforms, as username gluex, in parallel. The current platforms are:
    • jlabl3.jlab.org (RedHat Enterprise Linux 6, x86_64, with GCC 4.9.2)
    • jlabl5.jlab.org (RedHat Enterprise Linux 7, x86_64)
    • ifarm1101.jlab.org (CentOS 6.5, x86_64, with GCC 4.9.2)
    • ifarm1402.jlab.org (CentOS 7.2, x86_64)
  • Log files of the builds are created in the daily directory, for example, /u/scratch/gluex/nightly/2013-10-03/halld_jlabl3.log . For a particular platform, the output of both non-debug and debug builds are in a single log file.
  • A summary of errors and warnings from the last build is available at https://halldweb.jlab.org/nightly/nightly_build_errors.txt . This file is only updated for builds that have errors or warnings. For clean builds, no summary log is produced.
  • The summary of errors and warnings is also sent to the "nightly_build" simple email list.
  • To use one of the nightly builds, you can set up the environment as follows (assume you want to use August 31, 2015):
source /group/halld/Software/build_scripts/gluex_env_nightly.csh 2015-08-31

Note on ssh scheme

As mentioned above although the cron job runs on jlabl1, the builds are all actually done on other nodes. To do this without having to supply a passphrase, the cron job uses a special ssh private/public key pair that only allows the target script on the remote node (and no other command) to run only if the ssh connection comes from jlabl1 and if the target account holds the appropriate public key. This key has no passphrase associated with it[1]and thus can be used from a cron job. The remote target script is only mentioned in the authorized_keys file of the remote account. Only the ssh invocation is seen in the script (/home/gluex/bin/nightly.sh) on the local host (jlabl1).

Note that this special key pair is not the one used for standard ssh connections to gluex account on the CUE. The standard pair has a passphrase. This passphrase-less technique is described in a 2005 Linux Journal article and a CyberSmashup blog article.

Github Pull Request Tests

Whenever a pull request for the sim-recon Github repository is created or has new commits added to it, a test build is generated at JLab.

  • The notification from Github is passed along via the "webhook" functionality. This particular webhook is configured to send a HTTP POST message to halldweb.jlab.org/cgi-bin/build/build_sim-recon_wehook.py . The web server halldweb is configured to allow python scripts to run in that directory and requires a user/password combination specific to that directory, using simple HTTP authentication.
  • The python cgi-script looks for the relevant pull request event, and starts a test build on ifarm1402 using the same ssh scheme as the nightly builds described above.
  • These test builds use the software stored in /group/halld/Software/build_scripts/pull_request
  • The ssh command from the python script on halldweb calls build_pull_request_service_sshwrapper.sh. The procedure is managed by build_pull_request_service.sh, while the actual test build is performed in build_pull_request.sh.
  • The test builds are stored in /work/halld/pull_request_test . Debug logs are stored in this directory as ssh_log^BRANCH and env^BRANCH. The test builds and build logs are stored as sim-recon^BRANCH.
  • Several simple run-time tests with simulation and data are performed in test_pull_request.sh
  • The results of the test are posted as a comment on the pull request using leave_pull_request_comment.py, which sends a simple command to the Github REST API over HTTPS using the python requests library [note that this script uses python3].

Nightly Code Analysis (scan-build)

The scan-build analyzer that uses features built into the clang compiler is run nightly to produce a web report on potential problems identified in the code. Here's some details:

  • Results of the latest analysis can always be found here: https://halldweb.jlab.org/scan-build/LATEST
  • The scan-build program is run via cron job using the gluex account and is run only on ifarm1401
  • The cron job runs the script /home/gluex/bin/nightly-scan-build.csh which is maintained in svn here: https://halldsvn.jlab.org/repos/trunk/home/gluex/bin
  • This piggybacks from the nightly build of sim-recon located in /u/scratch/gluex/nightly/. It requires the setenv.csh script exists for the gcc compiler so that it can source it to get basic things like ROOT, XERCES, JANA, CCDB set up in the environment. (Could be changed to use gluex_env instead and may be done in the future.)
  • This requires the clang compiler. It is currently hardwired to use the 3.7.0 compiler installed in /group/halld/Software/ExternalPackages/clang-llvm/llvm_clang_3.7.0



  1. If it did, then that passphrase would have to somehow be incorporated into scripts, a practice which is generally discouraged for security reasons.