[Buildbot-devel] New, more efficient web stuff

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

On Jan 7, 2008 8:13 AM, Ben Hearsum <bhearsum at wittydomain.com> wrote:
> Dustin J. Mitchell wrote:
> > * the web is no longer a status subscriber, since it's not in the
> > business of receiving events, but of displaying the historical record
> > and the current status.  Instead, it's configured as an
> > "extra_service" -- basically, a Twisted service that gets (re)started
> > by the buildmaster, and does its own thing from there on out.
>
> Would it be possible to run this "extra service" on it's own? Something
> we've wanted to do for awhile is run a Waterfall on a machine that is
> _not_ the Buildmaster.

Not the way you're thinking -- the code to generate the HTML needs
access to the data structures of a running buildmaster.  You have two
options.

The first is already implemented -- using twisted.distrib, you can run
a web server on one machine that basically forwards requests for
certain pages over to the buildmaster.  I don't know the details of
setting this up -- a brief googling shows that twisted.distrib is on
twistedmatrix's UndocumentedWeb wiki page -- but presumably whoever
added that code to buildbot has done it :)

The second option is not implemented yet at all.  If we implement a
storage backend that uses a remotely-accessible database, such as
MySQL, then you can write a set of PHP scripts on your web server to
access that same database, and construct whatever sort of display
you'd like.

Dustin

-- 
Storage Software Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com