[Buildbot-devel] Dev / test / production instances of Buildbot?

[Greg Ward]

On 18 June 2012, Trask said:
> Ever since then I have been much more cautious about changes to 
> Buildbot; so cautious, in fact, that it hampers productivity.
> 
> Has anyone set up parallel instances of their production Buildbot 
> instance in order to test changes before using them in production?  I'd 
> love to hear how people have done this

Yup. I setup a second dev server to host test copies of *all* our key
infrastructure. It's got a test Mercurial, a test Bugzilla, a test
MySQL (we record every build there), and of course a test BuildBot.

The one thing I did wrong was use a spare physical machine, which is
now sitting under someone's desk. I should have created a VM. D'ohh.

Every slave host has a second "testslave" directory. I.e. the main
slave dir is (e.g.) /home/build/slave or e:\slave, and the test slave
is /home/build/testslave or e:\testslave.

> My brain-storming with a co-worker lead me to this plan.  It seems a 
> little inelegant but should serve the purpose:
> 
> My proposed steps to make a "test" instance of Buildbot:
> - install a second slave on every slave that currently exists; increment 
> port numbers by 1.
> - install a second master in the directory "master_test" beside the 
> existing "master" location.

That was actually my first attempt, running a second master on the
same host. Ended up being a PITA, mainly because of the port shift.
Having a second parallel dev server where all the same URLs (/hg,
/bugzilla, /buildbot) just work the same as our production server was
a big improvement.

       Greg
-- 
Greg Ward                                http://www.gerg.ca/
In order to understand recursion, you really have to understand recursion.