this is a build server made to be real-time, fast and dead simple to use. In other words, this was made to be cool :)

installation

install node.js

I recommend using the node version manager so that you can have as many node.js versions you want and switch among them pretty easily.

if you don't have node.js and npm installed already, run the commands below:

git clone git://github.com/creationix/nvm.git ~/.nvm
echo 'source $HOME/.nvm/nvm.sh' >> $HOME/.bash_profile
. $HOME/.nvm/nvm.sh

the snippet above must be run only once, but the one below you can do as many times you want

nvm install v0.6.10
nvm use v0.6.10
nvm alias default v0.6.10

install redis

MacOSX

$ brew install redis

Ubuntu and other Debian-ish GNU/Linux distros

$ sudo apt-get install redis-server

Windows

Forget it, bro. This CI server is cool, so it will NOT run on windows. Sorry about that :)

install emerald

$ npm install -g emerald

running it

$ emerald run

other options

you can pass the -s or --settings parameter to the emerald command line parameter, this will cause emerald to import the settings from the file and merge them over the default settings

below is a full description of all the options, if you want to write your own settings file, you can pretty much copy and paste the code below and add your own fine tune:

please consider $EMERALD_ROOT$ as the path that npm installed emerald for you when you ran npm install -g emerald

module.exports = {
    LOG_LEVEL: 3, /* refer to log levels in the README */
    SHUT_UP: false, /* when true emerald will produce absolutely NO logging output. It is used internally when emerald needs to run functional tests against the builtin server */
    GIT_POLL_INTERVAL: 3000, /* 60.000 miliseconds = 1 second */
    EMERALD_PORT: 3000,
    EMERALD_HOSTNAME: 'localhost',
    EMERALD_DOMAIN: 'http://localhost:3000', /* used internally to prefix links */
    REDIS_KEYS: {
        current_build: "emerald:current-build", /* the key that will hold the current build */
        build_queue: "emerald:build-queue" /* the key that will hold the build queue */
    },
    EMERALD_PATH: "~/.emerald", /* where emerald will store builds and metadata */
    SANDBOX_PATH: "~/.emerald/builds", /* the folder where emerald will store its builds, it can be set through the environment variable EMERALD_SANDBOX_PATH */
    ASSETS_PATH: "$EMERALD_ROOT$/public"
    LOCAL_FILE: function(...){}, /* please NEVER overwrite this function, it is used internally and you don't wanna mess up with that. Word. */
    VIEW_PATH: "$EMERALD_ROOT$/public/app/server/html", /* where emerald will search for swig templates */
    CLIENT_PATH: "$EMERALD_ROOT$/app/client", /* the path where the backbone part of emerald is implemented */
    BACKBONE_VIEW_PATH: "$EMERALD_ROOT$/app/client/html", /* where emerald will search for backbone view templates */
    SCRIPT_PATH: "$EMERALD_ROOT$/app/terminal/main.js", /* the path for the emerald CLI, you won't need to change it. Please don't even try :) */
    PID_PATH: PID_PATH, /* fullpath for the PIDFILE that emerald will use when running as a daemon */
    STDOUT_PATH: STDOUT_PATH, /* fullpath for the STDOUT file that emerald will write when running as a daemon */
    STDERR_PATH: STDERR_PATH  /* fullpath for the STDERR file that emerald will write when running as a daemon */
}

"hands on" hack guide

install the dependencies

1. node v0.6.10

2. npm 1.1.0-3

3. redis... just make sure it's running

4. global dependencies

npm install -g vows jshint

5. local dependencies

just run

npm install

*and should be enough to install all the dependencies in package.json

set up the pre-commit hook:

cd path/to/emerald

ln -s .development/pre-commit-hook .git/hooks/pre-commit
chmod +x .git/hooks/pre-commit

this is the result of activating the pre-commit hook:

run the tests!

unit tests

make unit

functional tests

make functional

or... run them all together

npm test

run the server!

npm start

fixtures for testing locally

make data

Dependencies and its explanations

clay.js

It's our persistency layer on redis, this lib an active record by Yipit.com you can see its documentation at github

redis

Mostly used for pub/sub and queue management, and connect-redis sessions, although we also explicitly declare it as the first connection in our models

clay.js configuration.

• github

express / socket.io / connect-redis

The web layer: express is the webserver, socket.io, in turn, is for real-time pushes to the clients. Connect-redis is a redis-backed session storage for express.

jade / less

Jade is a beautiful and shorthand template language, and less a shorthand styling language that has powers beyond just CSS.

underscore.js

this lib is like a polyfill for manipulating javascript objects with shorthand functions.

backbone.js

This awesome library allows us to organize the web app a lot better by providing MVC support on the client side. It doesn't mean all our client-side models are persisted on the server, they just leverage how the views should update themselves.

async

it's our flow-control library. Helps avoiding too much callback soup in our code.

• github

colors / mkdirp

colors helps us making the terminal feedback less boring by logging with color-formated output. mkdirp is just for creating directories recursively.

testing: vows and should

if you want to hack on emerald's code, then you're gonna need vows in order to run the tests which are written under the DSL provided by should.js

sketch of how this should work:

Server actors

As you can notice Emerald's compound has not only a HTTP server but also a few workers that runs in parallel to it:

Orchestrator

This guy subscribes to a set of meaningful signals sent to the redis pub/sub, deserializes it into JSON objects and broadcasts to all the socket.io connected clients.

In other words it captures all the server-side events and send to the connected clients so that the UI can be updated in real time.

Queue consumer

It's basically a structured callback passed to setInterval with the settings.GIT_POLL_INTERVAL as the interval param. So it sits there checking if there is a build already running, if not it gets the next instruction id to be build from the queue (if any instructions there) and spawns a Build Runner for that given instruction

The build queue is to a redis SortedSet in which the key is emerald:build-queue by default, but can be configured through settings.js

The Build Runner also sets a lock in Redis so that it doesn't run parallel builds, avoiding builds to violate each other's environment. After a build is finished it unsets the lock (key emerald:current-build)

If the queue is locked, then it just yields by doing nothing :D

Build Runner

Is an object that is instantiated with a models.Build() object as parameter, the it actually do build-related stuff:

1. git clone/pull
2. run the build script
3. send the appropriate events to the redis pub/sub (i.e: BuildInstruction enqueued, BuildInstruction created, Repository being fetched, so on...)

At this point you are probably asking yourself how can the Build Runner possibly take a build as instance since the runner is supposed to create it itself. Just take a look here and you will see that server.models.BuildInstruction instances have a run method that gets called by the queue consumer

Server-side events are sent to the clients

Since emerald was built with "real-time UI" in mind, its architecture is all event-based.

In other words the server actors publish events to the redis pub/sub, those events have JSON metadata serialized into it, so that the orchestrator sends those events to the socket.io clients which translates the events into Backbone model instances events.

This is basically how emerald's user interface looks like it's alive :D

Those are the current events that are handled by socket.io:

• BuildInstruction created
• BuildInstruction edited
• BuildInstruction enqueued
• BuildInstruction deleted
• Repository started fetching
• Repository finished fetching
• Repository being fetched
• Build started
• Build finished
• Build aborted
• Build stdout
• Build stderr
• Build output
• Build running
• General error

license

Emerald is released under GNU Affero General Public License version 3

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.