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PR Builder overview

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Mihai Plesa edited this page Aug 10, 2020 · 47 revisions

PR Builder overview

Every PR in brave-browser or brave-core needs to pass a series of automated checks before merging as described below.

GitHub overview

On each PR, you should see the checks section as below (unless it's a draft PR or has the CI/skip label applied).

GitHub checks section

Details link will take you to the actual check results (Jenkins private, Travis publicly accessible).

Jenkins overview

We have a private Jenkins server available at https://ci.brave.com (you need VPN and a Jenkins account). There are 10 pipelines at https://ci.brave.com/view/ci, per repo and per platform.

Each of these is setup in Jenkins as a multibranch pipeline. A scan is done every 5 minutes for new changes and (once detected) the job will automatically be queued up. Forks are ignored. When a new build starts it will cancel the previously running ones, unless it gets aborted for the following reasons:

  • PR labeled with CI/skip
  • PR is in draft

Extra skipping is available per platform using the CI/skip-android, CI/skip-ios, CI/skip-linux, CI/skip-macos, CI/skip-windows labels for PRs that do not need to run checks on all platforms.

Slack notifications will be sent to PR author based on a map that associates the GitHub user with their corresponding Slack username. To update, copy the value from our password manager, edit, then update in the Jenkins credential store github-to-slack-username-map variable.

You can see the history of checks by going into the specific PR Jenkins as seen in the list below.

Brave Core PR builder jobs in Jenkins

Helpful Jenkins links

When on a specific build from the build history there are some helpful links:

  • Console Output - view full build output
  • Parameters - view parameter values that have been passed to the build (as defined above)
  • Test Result - view test results (unit and browser tests together)
  • Replay - replay build (with option to alter pipeline)
  • Pipeline Steps - best view for seeing the full list of steps and debugging (can view status and output of individual steps)
  • Workspaces - view files in the build workspaces and nodes allocated to the build

Process overview

The checks that are done are defined in the Jenkinsfile at the root of the project https://github.com/brave/devops/blob/master/jenkins/jobs/browser/Jenkinsfile.

The above gets called independently by both https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/blob/master/Jenkinsfile and https://github.com/brave/brave-core/blob/master/Jenkinsfile. After the build is done, it will look for a PR in the other repo and update its status.

We use ephemeral nodes in AWS for building Android, Linux and Windows x64 (which get shutdown if idle for 30m - if no other builds start on them). For iOS and macOS builds we use physical machines (which means higher chance to re-use workspaces).

This Jenkinsfile defines the pipeline that builds in parallel for Android x86, iOS arm64, Linux, macOS and Windowx x64 with the steps below:

  • notify the PR author on Slack that build has started
  • checkout source code
  • pin locally branch in package.json if branch also exists in brave-core
  • install dependencies (npm install --no-optional) and remove gclient lock files
  • test scripts (npm run test:scripts)
  • initialize the repository (across runs we do rm -rf src/brave to force fetching the latest code then npm run init)
  • audit dependencies (npm run audit_deps)
  • run lint (npm run lint)
  • enable sccache
  • build
  • gn check (npm run gn_check)
  • audit network (npm run network-audit)
  • unit tests and browser tests (npm run test -- brave_unit_tests and npm run test -- brave_browser_tests)
  • create binaries (and optionally sign)
  • upload build artifacts to S3 (.apk, .zip, .dmg, .pkg, .deb, .rpm, .exe)
  • report build results and link to artifacts via Slack (to PR author and #build-downloads-bot)

To navigate from the brave-browser-build-pr-* or the brave-core-build-pr-* pipeline please go to Console Output and press the link to pr-brave-browser-.... This will take you to where actually everything gets executed.

Besides the checks done by our Jenkins job, there are some additional checks done via Travis:

  • JavaScript lint and unit tests
  • security checks
  • Python lint (pep8)

We also use sonarcloud.io for code quality checks.

Advanced steps

Start a PR builder Jenkins job

To build a PR on demand press on the Build with Parameters link from the Jenkins job view (brave-browser-build-pr or brave-core-build-pr). The following parameters are available:

  • CHANNEL - nightly by default but can be dev, beta or release as well
  • BUILD_TYPE - Release by default but can be Debug as well
  • WIPE_WORKSPACE - false by default
  • SKIP_INIT - false by default
  • DISABLE_SCCACHE - false by default (only for Linux and macOS)
  • SKIP_SIGNING - true by default
  • DCHECK_ALWAYS_ON - true by default

Same is valid for restarts, always do them from the top level jobs for proper status reporting.

Resources

  • for employees, join the #brave-browser-ci Slack channel
  • for external contributors (community), we would like to have the content of these checks be publicly viewable in the future
  • additional non-public information is available in the devops wiki
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