Blog/Kiwix Compile Farm

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Published 14/06/2012 by Kelson (talk)

Kiwix is a special software because it is difficult to define:

  • A Desktop software for browsing offline content with ZIM on Mac, Windows and Linux.
  • A Server allowing to serve ZIM content on those platforms + ARM Linux.
  • A library of ZIM files for popular content: Wikipedia, Wikileaks, etc.
  • Very few developers (most of the time it's 2).
  • Very large (and growing) number of users.
  • “Small” code base (about 50,000 lines of code).

So far, all this was maintained by hand, the ZIM files are created from a complex procedure of scripts and mirror setups, the releases are created manually on all platforms, etc.

You got it, it's difficult to keep up with improving the software, fixing bugs, generating new content ZIM files, building and testing the software on all platforms.

Our first step into the right direction was getting the translations done on TranslateWiki and it got us to ship Kiwix now with 80+ languages.

Thanks to sponsorship by Wikimedia CH, we decided to first tackle the build problem as it's the most annoying.

The Problem

Kiwix releases on the following:

  • Mac OSX 10.6+ Intel Universal (Intel 32b, Intel64b)
  • Linux 32b “static“ (no dependencies)
  • Linux 64b static
  • Sugar .xo for OLPC
  • Windows 32b.
  • Armel5 (kiwix-serve only)
  • Source code.
  • Debian wheezy package 32b.
  • Debian wheezy package 64b.
  • Linux 32/64b with dependencies (used to be a PPA for Ubuntu until they removed xulrunner).

Knowing that only reg has a Mac, that the Windows setup for building Kiwix is complicated, and that both Kelson and reg are using Linux, testing and distributing new versions of the code is very difficult.

This is not a unique problem; most large multi-platform software face the same issues and we did nothing but imitate them: we deployed a build farm.

The Solution

The solution looks like the following schema: a bunch of Virtualbox VM, a Qemu one for arm, buildbot on all of them.

Builbot Diagram

As you can see, the builbot master controls all the slaves which creates their own builds and sends them to the Web server's repository.

Buildbot

A compile farm is a set of servers; each building a platform or target of the software. To manage those, a large number of software exist.

After some research, we chose Buildbot because:

  • Easy installion
  • It looked very powerful
  • Clear documentation
  • It's written in Python (including the configuration file).

The deal-maker was really the tutorial on the website wich allowed us to imagine the required steps without to actually get our hands dirty.

The Python configuration file is a great feature as it allows a very flexible configuration without a dedicated syntax.

Builbot is divided into two softwares:

  • the master which holds the whole configuration (the only file you care about).
  • slaves which only needs to run the slave software (python). Those are logic-less.

Kiwix already rents a very powerful server in a data center for serving downloads. We used it to hold everything.

VirtualBox

All the build slaves (except for the arm target which is not supported by VBox) are VirtualBox Virtual Machines (VM):

  • 512MB RAM
  • 20GB HD
  • 2 NIC: NAT for accessing Internet (dhcp) ; Host-only for buildbot (Fixed local IP).

OSX VM is 1GB RAM and 40GB HDD.

All the VMs were installed through VRDP (VNC-like protocol) until the network is configured and ssh access is enabled.

See also: VM Setup

QEmu

QEmu was required to get an armel VM. We used aurel32's debian images.

Note: In order to ease the SSH connexion, halt and start of the VMs, we wrote a wrapper script around VirtualBox.

Configuring and running

Configuring buildbot is pretty straightforward once you know what you want to do. Configuration is composed of the following components:

  • Slave definitions (name, login, password)
  • Builders: targets composed of steps (commands) executed on a slave.
  • Schedulers: Triggers for when to start builders.
  • Status: What to do with output of builders.

The hard part is defining the builders as this is where you indicate how to retrieve source code, launch your configure script, compile, and tranfer your build somewhere else.

Take a look at ours as an example: master.cfg

We don't use any advanced features so it's easy to understand. We chose:

  • fixed daily times to run our builds (at night – server time)
  • builds (tarball, etc) are uploaded to the server's /var/www/ for direct web access.

Buildbot handles the transfer of files between master and slave.

  • We can trigger builds at any time from the web interface.
  • We list build results on the web page and by mail in a dedicated mailing-list.
  • Builds are announced and controllable by the IRC bot.

Although it's simple, it took a lot of tweaking and tests (fortunately it's easy) to write a good configuration file, you need to have a proper and documented build mechanism for all your targets otherwise you'll probably go crazy. We completed a complete rewrite of our autotools Makefiles for all platforms __before__ we setup buildbot. It sounds dumb but it's important.

Outcomes

  • Every day, a new release for all targets available for download ; properly named with the SVN revision and the date.
  • Ability to fire a build at any time from the Web UI.
  • Kiwix to be integrated into Debian sid in the coming days (and thus in the next stable release).

Things you should know

If you intend to reproduce, here's a few things we've learned and want to share. 

* Installing OSX on non-Mac hardware is tricky: you need a recent Intel CPU (support for VTx) but not too recent otherwise your OSX Install DVD won't know about it (and refuse to install).
* On OSX, Apple packages (MacOSX updates, XCode) have an expiration period. If you install an XCode version 2 years (that's an example) after it's been released, the installer will fail with no useful feedback. It's due to the package's signature being too old. You can still install it by unpacking/repacking the packages.
* SSH to your QEmu VM is done using a QEmu proxy so you ssh to localhost on a different port.
* VRDP requires a good connexion if you intend to do a lot of configuration inside Windows (384k clearly is a pain!).
* Buildbot slaves freezes frequently. Not sure why but sometimes it fails to answer to build request and stays attached doing nothing. As a workaround, we delete and recreate the buildbot slave folder daily in a cron job.
* Buildbot slaves have network issues some times. We're not sure if it's related to buildbot, VBox or something else but it's frequent that the slave can't checkout the source tree or can't download our dependencies from the web.
* Windows slave frequently loose connexion to the master. Might just be a Windows configuration issue.

== What's Next? ==

* Improve our wrapper script to handle VRDP access to VMs by controlling iptables.
* Add SSH to the Windows slave so we can do basic tests in console.
* Investigate the network/slaves problems so that it works 24/7.
* Automate & build a similar platform for the creation of ZIM files so we can focus only on code thereafter.
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