Continuous Integration

Overview

The OpenHatch code has a suite of tests. It’s important that when we deploy the code changes to the website that all tests are passing.

Continuous integration helps our developers see if their code changes are passing all tests or are failing a test and additional code changes are needed.

Travis CI

Travis CI is a hosted, distributed “continuous integration” system (read more on Wikipedia about Travis CI). The GitHub page for the oh-mainline indicates whether our tests currently are passing.

Using Travis CI

There are multiple ways that Travis CI communicates the source code’s current build status and whether tests are passing:

  • The first is the “build” badge on the oh-mainline GitHub page displayed at the top of the README. Clicking on the “build” badge will display Travis CI’s status page for OpenHatch.

  • OpenHatch’s Travis CI status page can be directly found at https://travis-ci.org/openhatch/oh-mainline.

  • GitHub also provides information on every pull request about Travis CI’s testing and status related to the individual pull request. This is very helpful for developers and reviewers.

    Note

    Currently, Travis CI is showing that our tests are not passing when tested with a MySQL database. Details can be found in the OpenHatch issue tracker. We hope to have this issue resolved soon.

Configuration for Travis CI

The .travis.yml file in the oh-mainline directory contains configuration information used by Travis CI.

Jenkins

Jenkins is a “continuous integration” tool (read more on Wikipedia). It wakes up once an hour, checks the git repository for new commits, and runs the test suite. For additional information about Jenkins, read more on Jenkins.

Status information about continuous integration projects can be found on OpenHatch’s Jenkins dashboard : http://vm3.openhatch.org

Jenkins configuration

There are a number of “projects” in Jenkins. Different ones run different suites of tests in the OpenHatch codebase. They include or exclude different Django apps from the OpenHatch codebase.

For example,

  • Test the “installation” instructions
    • This tests the OpenHatch developer instructions for building OpenHatch.
  • Test the “customs” app
    • The tests for the customs app often go out to the network and can break if the remote servers change their APIs.
  • Test the “search” app
    • The volunteer opportunity finder (“search”) tests can take a while to run, so we separate them out.
  • Test all apps except customs and search
    • This is the catchall that tests the rest of the code.

Status information about continuous integration projects can be found on OpenHatch’s Jenkins dashboard.

Jenkins administration

Right now, only Raffi and Asheesh can modify the configuration of Jenkins.

Anyone can enqueue a run of the test suite by clicking a “Build” link within a Jenkins project. That’s a good thing.

Future work

It would be super nice if, whenever there was a commit to GitHub master that passed all the tests, it would be automatically deployed.