[Buildbot-devel] Very basic question

[A.T.Hofkamp]

> Message: 8
> Date: Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:44:23 +0100
> From: Roger Oberholtzer <roger at opq.se>
> Subject: [Buildbot-devel] Very basic question
> To: buildbot-devel at lists.sourceforge.net
> Message-ID: <1262619863.27767.68.camel at acme.pacific>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> 
> I am setting up a buidbot system, and have come to a place where the
> docs are a bit unclear. In section 2.5, on setting up a slave, step 6
> refers to some information that one gets when telling a master about a
> slave. Step 7 says to use the info from step 6 in the create-slave
> command to make the slave. This implies that there are two commands to
> set up a slave: the first (in step 6) to tell the master about it, and
> the second (in step 7) to actually set it up.

No, step 6 is not a command.

The owner of the machine running the buildmaster and the owner of the machine running a buildslave 
can be different persons.
In particular, think in an open source project, where the master runs at the project server, and a 
user wants to provide build-time at his machine.

Your confusion is probably due to the fact that the steps in section 2.5 are written from the 
viewpoint of such a user.


The owner of the project machine creates the slave entries in the master.cfg file first.
(when this is done is left implicit in the description)

BuildmasterConfig['slaves'] is a list of BuildSlave instances, where the slave name and password are 
defined for each slave.

the name of the buildmaster machine is the name of the machine that runs the buildmaster.


The port to connect to is defined in

BuildmasterConfig['slavePortnum']

note that in the 'slavePortnum' setting you can also specify a network interface, which affects what 
buildmaster machine name the slave should use.


> My questions are:
> 
> 1) What command (or step in the docs) is step 6 referring to? I seems it
> would not be the create-slave command, as that seems to be later after
> some info is obtained from the master.

Step 6 is the transfer of the information from the master.cfg file at the buildmaster machine, to 
the user setting up the slave, ie an email or a few IRC lines.
This is done manually.

> 2) What user should you be when you create the slave? I would imagine
> that you should be the buildbot master user when doing whatever is
> described in step 6, and that you should be the buildbot slave user when
> doing step 7.

Correct, as owner of the machine providing build-time, using the account that will be used for 
running the build slave.

> 
> Or am I just making things more complex than they are?

My guess is that the documentation makes context assumptions that do not hold for you.


Good luck,
Albert