[Buildbot-devel] Has anyone looked at changing buildbot to use ssh to connect to the slaves?

[Michael Wetherell]

On Wednesday 26 March 2008 05:59, Chad Reese wrote:
> I've just setup my first buildbot server with a few slaves. The
> documentation was quite good, and I've got useful builds. One thing I
> don't quite understand is the need for buildbot to have anything
> installed on the slave machine. Since each build step boils down to a
> remote shell command, why doesn't buildbot just use ssh?

Hi,

We're doing something similar already, using telnet and ftp in our case, 
to run builds on machines that aren't able to make outgoing 
connections:
	http://buildbot.tt-solutions.com/wx/

It would be good IMHO, if there was some support for it in buildbot. 
Otherwise it's probably better to stick to the conventional approach.

OTOH, if you don't have a choice, you can rig something up already 
without changing buildbot:

For example:
- you could set up a slave on the same machine as the master
- step 1 of a build could be a conventional checkout 
- step 2 a ShellCommand to scp or rsync the source to the remote
- step 3 a Compile step with command 'ssh fred at remote make'

It's a bit more complicated if you are connecting to a machine with a 
very large user database (which we are in our case). In that case you 
won't be able to get away with simply logging in and back out with each 
step, you will need to keep the connection going between steps (which 
is what we do).

Regards,
Mike