Ciborg: Your Chief Administrative Aide on Cloud City

Easily create your CI server on EC2

Lando Calrissian relies on a cyborg to keep Cloud City afloat, and now you can rely on Ciborg to get your continuous integration server running in the cloud. Ciborg is a gem that will help you spin-up, bootstrap, and install Jenkins CI for your Rails app on Amazon EC2.

What do I get?

Commands for creating, starting, stopping, or destroying your CI server on EC2
The full Travis CI environment on Ubuntu 12.04
A Jenkins frontend for monitoring your builds

Tasks:
  ciborg add_build <name> <repository> <branch> <command>  # Adds a build to Ciborg
  ciborg bootstrap          # Configures Ciborg's master node
  ciborg certificate        # Dump the certificate
  ciborg chef               # Uploads chef recipes and runs them
  ciborg config             # Dumps all configuration data for Ciborg
  ciborg create             # Create a new Ciborg server using EC2
  ciborg create_vagrant     # Creates a vagrant instance
  ciborg destroy_ec2        # Destroys all the ciborg resources on EC2
  ciborg help [TASK]        # Describe available tasks or one specific task
  ciborg open               # Open a browser to Ciborg
  ciborg setup              # Sets up ciborg through a series of questions
  ciborg ssh                # SSH into Ciborg
  ciborg trust_certificate  # Adds the current master's certificate to your OSX keychain

Read on for an explanation of what each one of these steps does.

Install

gem install ciborg

Ciborg runs independently of your project and is not a dependency.

Setup

If this is your first time running ciborg and you do not have configuration file, yet, run:

ciborg setup

It will ask you a series of questions that will get you up and running.

Adjust Defaults (Optional)

If you don't like the default, Rails-centric, build script you can create your own:

#!/bin/bash -le

source .rvmrc

# install bundler if necessary
set -e

gem install bundler --no-ri --no-rdoc && bundle install

# debugging info
echo USER=$USER && ruby --version && which ruby && which bundle

bundle exec rake spec

In your config/ciborg.yml, there are defaults set for recommended values. For example, the EC2 instance size is set to "c1.medium".

You can save on EC2 costs by using a tool like projectmonitor or ylastic to schedule when your instances are online.

Commit and push your changes

At this point you will need to create a commit of the files generated or modified and push those changes to your remote git repository so Jenkins can execute the build script when it pulls down your repo for the first time.

If you must, you can do this on a branch. Then later you can change the branch in ciborg.yml later and rechef.

Modify recipe list

You can modify the chef run list by setting the recipes key in config/ciborg.yml. The default is:

["pivotal_ci::jenkins", "pivotal_ci::limited_travis_ci_environment", "pivotal_ci"]`

Because we're using the cookbooks from Travis CI, you can look through all the recipes Travis has available, and add any that you need.

Manually starting your ciborg instance

Launch an instance, allocate and associates an elastic IP and updates config/ciborg.yml:
```
ciborg create
```
Bootstrap the instance using the boostrap_server.sh script. The script installs ruby prerequisites and installs RVM:
```
ciborg bootstrap
```
Upload the contents of Ciborg's cookbooks, create a soloistrc, and run chef:
```
ciborg chef
```

Your ciborg instance should now be up and running. You will be able to access your CI server at: http://<your instance address>/ with the username and password you chose during configuration. Or, if you are on a Mac, run ciborg open. For more information about Jenkins CI, see http://jenkins-ci.org.

Custom Chef Recipes

If you need to write your own chef recipes to install your project's dependencies, you can add a cookbooks directory to the root of your project. Make sure to delete the cookbook_paths section from your ciborg.yml (to use the default values), or add ./chef/project-cookbooks to the cookbook_paths section.

So, to have a bacon recipe, you should have cookbooks/pork/recipes/bacon.rb file in your repository.

Troubleshooting

Shell access for your instance

ciborg ssh

Terminate all Ciborg instances on your account and deallocate their elastic IPs

ciborg destroy_ec2

Color

Ciborg installs the ansicolor plugin, however you need to configure rspec to generate colorful output. One way is to include --color in your .rspec and update your spec_helper.rb to include

RSpec.configure do |config|
 config.tty = true
end

Dependencies

ci_reporter
fog
godot
haddock
hashie
httpclient
net-ssh
thor

Forking

Please be aware that Ciborg uses git submodules. In order to git source Ciborg in your Gemfile, you will need the following line:

gem "ciborg", :github => "pivotal/ciborg", :submodules => true

Testing

Ciborg is tested using rspec, vagrant and test kitchen. You will need to set environment variables with your AWS credentials to run tests which rely on ec2:

export EC2_KEY=FOO
export EC2_SECRET=BAR

Contributing

We welcome pull requests. Pull requests should have test coverage for quick consideration. Please fork, make your changes on a branch, and open a pull request.