System Dependencies

There are more now. In order to successfully install all of Buildbot’s dependencies with Pip, I needed a few more apt packages:

python-dev
python-openssl
libffi-dev
libssl-dev

Then for sanity’s sake make a virtualenv, and install the following packages. Note that having too new a sqlalchemy will break things.:

buildbot==0.8.12
boto
pyopenssl
cryptography
SQLAlchemy<=0.7.10

Virtualenvs

Troubleshooting compatibility issues with system packages on a host that runs several Python services with various dependency versions is predictably terrible.

The potential problem with switching to running Buildbot only from a virtualenv is that developers with access to the buildmaster might want to restart it and miss the extra step of activating the virtualenv. I addressed this by adding the command to activate the virtualenv (using the virtualenv’s absolute path) to the ~/.bashrc of the user that we run Buildbot as. This way, we’ve gained the benefits of having our dependencies consolidated without adding the cost of an extra workflow step to remember.

Template changes

Most of Buildbot’s status pages worked fine after the upgrade, but the console view threw a template error because it couldn’t find any variable named “categories”. The fix was to simply copy the new template from venv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/buildbot/status/web/templates/console.html to my-buildbot/master/templates/console.html.

That’s it!

Rust currently has these updates on the development buildmaster, but not yet (as of 10/14/2015) in prod.