continuum

README

CONTINUUM

Continuum is a lightweight continuous integration tool: no web interface, no scheduler. It runs on command line and is triggered by cron.

Installation

Drop your platform executable continuum_os_arch, in the bin directory of the distribution archive, somewhere in you PATH and rename it continuum. For instance, on 64 bits Linux, you would copy continuum_linux_amd64 to /usr/local/bin/continuum.

Configuration

Configuration is in YAML format:

directory: /tmp
status:    /tmp/continuum-status.yml
port:      6666
email:
  smtp-host: smtp.nowhere.com:25
  recipient: nobody@nowhere.com
  sender:    nobody@nowhere.com
  success:   true
  once:      true
modules:
  - name:    Continuum
    url:     https://github.com/c4s4/continuum.git
    branch:  develop
    command: |
      set -e
      make test

The first part indicates:

• directory: the directory where modules will be checked out. Currently only GIT projects are supported.
• status: this is the name of the file were are stored modules status (to determine if their repository changed since last run and if last build was a success or a failure).
• port: the port that continuum listens to ensure that only one instance is running at a time. This port should be free on the host machine.
• email: put ~ if you don't want any email.

If you wait to receive email reports, provide following fields:

• smtp-host: the hostname and port of your SMTP server.
• recipient: the email of the recipient of the build report.
• sender: the email address if the sender of the report.
• success: tells if continuum should send an email on success. If false, it will only send an email on build error.
• once: if you want to send a single mail while the status of a module changes.

The second part is made of the list of modules, with, for each module:

• name: the name of the module.
• url: the URL of the module that GIT will use to get the sources.
• branch: the branch to build (such as master or develop).
• command: the bash script to run tests, must return 0 on success and a different value on error (as any Unix script should).

You can pass the configuration file to use on command line. If you pass no configuration file on command line, continuum will look for following files to use:

• ~/.continuum.yml
• /etc/gontinumm.yml

Crontab

This script is triggered using cron, with a configuration as follows (in file /etc/cron.d/continuum):

# /etc/cron.d/continuum
# cron configuration to run gontinuum

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
MAILTO=""

# run continuum every 15 minutes
*/15 * * * *    user    continuum >> /tmp/continuum.log

This will run continuum every 15 minutes. When continuum starts, it checks if repository has changed for all modules, comparing its hash with the one stored in status file.

If repository has changed, continuum clones it and runs command for tests. If script returns 0 (which is the Unix standard to tell that a command was successful), the test is OK, else it is a failure.

Continuum prints a summary of the tests results and sends an email (or not depending on email settings) for each test. Recommanded email configuration is to set success and once to true. This will send an email when status of a module changes (that is on test success when module was broken and test failure when it was OK).

TODO

• Fix spam when failing to clone repository.

Enjoy!