Deploying debci to your own infrastructure

Architecture

The following picture represents the debci architecture:

The whole system communicates using an AMQP server, in this case rabbitmq, as a message queue.
Test jobs are injected into a queue by the debci-enqueue command line tool.
Another command-line tool, called debci-batch, can be used to periodically inject all test jobs for packages that were recently uploaded, or that had one or more of its dependencies updated. It reuses debci-enqueue to inject each test job.
test jobs are picked up from the test queue by debci-worker daemons. They run the tests, and push the results back into a different queue.
debci-collector receives the test results, processes them, feeds the database with the results, and produces the HTML pages, atom feeds etc that in the web interface.
Each component (debci-collector, debci-worker, rabbitmq, and the command line tools) can live in different hosts if necessary, as long as all of the debci components can connect to the rabbitmq server.
You can have as many debci-worker nodes in the system as you want, but there must be only one debci-collector.

Deployment procedure

First install rabbitmq:

$ sudo apt install rabbitmq-server

Install the debci-collector:

$ sudo apt install debci-collector

The installation will prompt for the address of the AMQP server. If debci-collector is on the same host as rabbitmq-server, that prompt can be left blank.

On each worker node, install apt-cacher-ng to cache package downloads, and debci-worker itself:

$ sudo apt install apt-cacher-ng debci-worker

As with debci-collector, you will also be prompted for the address of AMQP server, and can also leave it blank if the worker is on the same server as rabbitmq-server.

Note that when first installed, debci-worker will first build a testbed (a chroot, container, or a virtual machine image, depening on the selected backend), and only after that is finished the worker will be able to start processing test jobs.

Submitting test jobs

On any host that can connect to rabbitmq-server, first install debci:

$ sudo apt install debci

As usual, you will prompted for the address of the AMQP server. If the rabbitmq-server is on the same host, just leave it blank.

Say you want to run the tests for the ruby-defauts package. It is as easy as

$ debci enqueue ruby-defaults

Scheduling job submission

By default, debci will not submit any jobs. You need to decide how, and how often, you want to submit jobs. A simple way of doing that is using cron.

Example 1: schedule tests for a set of packages once a day

# /etc/cron.d/debci
0 7 * * * debci debci enqueue rake rubygems-integration ruby-defaults

Example 2: schedule tests for all pending packages evety 4 hours:

# /etc/cron.d/debci
17 */4 * * * debci debci batch

You can also automate calls to debci enqueue in any other way you want.

Multiple worker processes per node

If you have worker nodes that have lots of CPUs and a large amount of RAM available you can run multiple worker daemons at once.

TODO

Setting up the LXC backend

TODO