Suckless Continous Integration

Jenkins, Travis, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI. The list goes on. This is a minimal tool for fulfilling the CI (Continous Integration) use case.

Brainstorm

If you dont want to congest your CI server. Too bad. Write faster ci suites. (TODO: implement runners)

I would like to try to avoid writing a million REST APIs, as that just results in bloat usually.

Could this also be used as a systest replacement? The value of systest is the drivers and the configuration files. Not really the controllers themselves. But yes, this system could replace the systest runner scripts. But not the drivers or the configuration files themselves...

Using

/etc/sci/conf.d/pipelines.conf

aaltitoad-release   https://github.com/sillydan1/aaltitoad      onpush-main         /home/sci/pipelines/cpp-dev-git.sh
aaltitoad-develop   https://github.com/sillydan1/aaltitoad      onpush-dev          /home/sci/pipelines/cpp-rel-git.sh
schoolnotes         https://gitlab.com/sillydan/schoolnotes     manual-name         "echo hello"
horse               https://gtz.dk/horse"                       manual-name         "curl -X POST https://example.com"
cool-horse          https://gtz.dk/horse"                       manual-name         "docker run --rm -v $SCI_PIPELINE_DIR:$SCI_PIPELINE_DIR -v /home/sci/pipelines:/pipelines alpine /pipelines/your-script.sh"
rad-horse           https://gtz.dk/horse"                       manual-name         "/home/sci/pipelines/dockerized-horse.sh"
<name>              <url>                                       <trigger-filename>  <pipeline-command>

Triggers are just bare files that reside in /etc/sci/triggers/ - this means that multiple pipelines can use the same trigger. When a trigger file is being written to or touched, this triggers the associated pipeline. Trigger files are automatically created by the scid daemon during startup or reconfiguring.

Any webhooks should be managed by shim-APIs / adapter APIs that are very slim (possibly flask) REST APIs that just listen for webhook event triggers and does a simple touch <associated file>. It could even read the same configuration file as scid uses to autogenerate these webhooks. But it is explicity NOT part of the core system, as that would be unneeded bloat.

How do I get information about a running pipeline? Perhaps a /var/tmp/sci/<pipeline-name> is continually updated with runtime information? Then you can cat, or tail -f it to get the information.

scid manages running subprocesses, so it must be implemented in a language that handles that nicely.

Pipelines - Should pipelines have a custom language? NO! God already gave us shell scripts! Why would we reinvent the wheel? Take a page out of Jenkins' book. scid should just call some command on trigger. That command could / should usually be a quick shell script (these calls are executed in the dispatched separate thread, so dont worry about sleeping or whatever you need to do). These scripts are equivalent to the Jenkins pipelines, and should update their current state in /var/tmp/scid/$PIPELINE_NAME by simply writing to the file (when implementing runners, we probably need to rsync these files automagically). Oh, and dont worry about cleaning up. Each pipeline execution will be placed in a /tmp/<pipeline-name>-<uuid>/ directory and will be executed by a gimped user. If you need to interact with the linux stuff and it might break other pipelines or whatever, then your pipeline-command should just start a docker container, volume mount the tmpdir and what else you need and run your command in that.

Need multistep pipelines? Then write a multistep shell script! You're the boss of your own CI server man.

#!/bin/bash
# cpp-dev-git-pipeline,sh
# NOTE: Will be executed from /tmp/$SCI_PIPELINE_NAME-<uuid>/
git clone -b dev "$SCI_PIPELINE_URL" "$SCI_PIPELINE_NAME"
echo "clone success" > "/var/tmp/sci/$SCI_PIPELINE_NAME" # You can have any kind of data in the pipeline status file.
cd "$SCI_PIPELINE_NAME"
cmake -B build
cmake --build build

Secrets

Not planned yet. But they could be as simple as a keystore.

Development

What language should I implement scid in?

• c slow devtime, decent tooling, very minimal and forces you to be minimal also. Maybe
• c++ slow devtime, good tooling, very familiar. Can easily get out of hand. Maybe
• python quick, easy, slow performance, terrible multiprocessing capabilities. Maybe
• java slow devtime, bloated. No.
• rust slow devtime (not familiar), great tooling, too many risks for a first prototype. No.
• shell quick, easy, instant spaghetti. No.