Build Buddy

Build Buddy is a daemon that does buddy builds of your software for you. It's controlled by Slack and GitHub pull requests.

I recommend installing Homebrew to install either rbenv or rvm as is your preference. NOTE: I only use rbenv so you may encounter issues with rvm. The project requires ruby 2.2.2.

If you are using rbenv I recommend installing rbenv-bundler with brew to avoid the need to remember to type bundle exec to use local configured Gems.

Install the Build Buddy Gem using:

gem install build-buddy

Before you do anything create a .bbconfig file with the following format:

BuildBuddy.configure do |config|
  config.github_webhook_port = 4567
  config.github_webhook_secret_token = '...'
  config.github_webhook_repo_full_name = '.../...'
  config.github_api_token = '...'
  config.slack_api_token = '...'
  config.slack_build_channel = "#..."
  config.slack_pr_channel = "#..."
  config.slack_builders = ['@...']
  config.build_output_dir = "$HOME/Projects/..."
  config.num_saved_build_outputs = 3
  config.pull_request_build_script = "bin/pull-request-build"
  config.branch_build_script = "bin/branch-build"
  config.pull_request_root_dir = "$HOME/Projects/..."
  config.branch_root_dir = "$HOME/Projects/..."
  config.allowed_build_branches = ['v1.0']
  config.server_base_uri = "https://..."
  config.mongo_uri = "mongodb://localhost:27017/..."
end

Customize the build scripts based on your project type.

Firstly, set up a Slack account for your organization. Navigating the Slack API configuration can be quite a challenge. You'll be creating a bot as a custom integration to Slack.

1. In a web browser, navigate to https://api.slack.com/bot-users
2. Click on the "creating a new bot user" button.
3. Give the bot an @ name, following the onscreen instructions.
4. On the next screen, give the bot a description and copy the API token to the .bbconfig file as the config.slack_api_token value.

Now you have a build bot configured, start the build-buddy script. Next start a private conversation with your bot and ask it something like, "What is your status?" Actually, it will respond to just the words status and help too.

Next it's time to get GitHub integration working. You'll need to generate a personal access token for the user that will be committing build tags and version updates for the build.

1. Log in to GitHub as the user that the build will be acting as. It's wise to create a user specifically for builds to avoid giving access to you personal GitHub account.
2. Go to the drop down in the top right hand corner (the one with the user icon, next to the arrow) and select Settings from the menu.
3. Go to Personal access tokens and create a new token.
4. Give the token a name, including for example the machine the token is used on, the words "build-buddy", etc.. Select repo, repo:status, repo_deployment, public_repo, write:repo_hook, read:repo_hook scopes, then Generate token
5. Copy the token on this screen into the config.github_api_token setting in the .bbconfig

Finally, you need to set up a webhook for pull-requests to the repository. Do the steps:

1. In order for GitHub to send events to your build-buddy instance you must have an endpoint visible over the Internet. I strongly recommend you only use HTTPS for the webhook events. There are a couple of good ways to create the webhook endpoint:

   1. Install ngrok in order to create a public endpoint that GitHub can send the web hook to. Super easy and a great way to get started. You configure ngrok to forward requests to build-buddy on your local machine.
   2. Use a web server such as nginx running on the same machine as build-buddy that can proxy the requests to build-buddy. Instructions on how to configure nginx to that can be found in nginx Configuration.

2. Once you know the webhook endpoint endpoint, e.g. https://api.mydomain.com/, go to the master repo for the project (the one that all the forks will create pull request too) and select Settings

3. Enter the URL for the webhook, plus the path /webhook.

4. Create secret token using for use by the webhook. This lets build-buddy know the call is actually from GitHub:

   ruby -rsecurerandom -e 'puts SecureRandom.hex(20)'

   Then, paste this token into the .bbconfig file under the config.github_webhook_secret_token setting.

5. Finally, select "Let me select individual events" and check the "Pull Request" checkbox

As soon as you save the webhook it will send a ping message to the build-buddy service. You should get a 200 reponse. If you do then congratulations, GitHub is talking to your build-buddy instance. You will now get a buddy build status check on your pull requests.

After you have done at least one pull request, you can go to "Settings > Branches" and enable branch protection for any branches you desire, thus requiring buddy builds before commits can be made to those branches.

Finally, build-buddy must be configured to write build metrics to a MongoDB database. Setting up MongoDB properly, with it's own user and group and password protected accounts, is straightforward but requires quite a few steps. Follow the instructions in Installing MongoDB on macOS.

Once you have MongoDB up and running, simply add an entry to the .bbconfig file:

config.mongo_uri = "mongodb://user:password@localhost:27017/build-buddy"

or if you choose not to use a user/password:

config.mongo_uri = "mongodb://localhost:27017/build-buddy"

The following variables are passed into the config.branch_build_script and config.pull_request_build_script:

• BB_BUILD_OUTPUT_DIR is the directory where the build log is placed and where report files should be placed.
• BB_BUILD_SCRIPT the name of the build script being run.
• BB_GIT_BRANCH the branch being built.
• BB_GIT_REPO_NAME the repo name.
• BB_GIT_REPO_OWNER the repo owner.
• BB_METRICS_DATA_FILE the name of the build metrics file.
• BB_MONGO_URI the full URI for connecting to the MongoDB for report generation.