[Buildbot-devel] separating buildslaves from testslaves

[john gale]

My first buildbot setup, and it's succeeding, to some degree :)

In the system I'm trying to create, I need the buildslaves to be  
different than the testslaves.  From what I understand so far of  
buildbot, this isn't the default logic;  a builder, once finished  
building, generally has buildSteps to run unit tests on the results.

But I need to separate the testslave out, so that a buildslave can  
build a project, tarball the results, and somehow send it over to a  
testslave to install and then test.  (The reason for this being,  
sometimes what you're installing will have an effect on the next  
build, and you always want to build on a virgin machine.)

Analyzing this didn't yield any obvious answers, and so we pieced  
together a solution which could work.  The question of course being,  
could this really work, and is there a better suggestion for achieving  
it?

The proposal:

1 Create a buildslave factory that has buildSteps of checkout, build,  
tarball, upload to some known http server.
2 The last step of this buildslave is to commit the http path to the  
tarball back into the repository somewhere.
3 Create a testslave factory that listens only to this results  
repository
4 addSteps to the testslave factory to checkout this tarball location,  
install it, and start running the tests
5 (last steps of testslave factory would be to revert installation  
back to virgin machine)

Would there be a better way?

thanks much,

	~ john

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updated October 12, 2005