DEPRECATED!!!! Ciborg is no longer under active development.

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.

Initial Setup

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

ciborg setup

This will ask you a series of questions that will get you up and running. You will need the following information available:

• The URL of your git repository. Jenkins needs to clone from this URL without supplying user authentication
• An SSH key that has pull access to the repository
• Any shell commands you want to run for your build
• Your AWS credentials
• The SSH key to access your EC2 instance

Your ciborg instance should now be up and running. You will be able to access it 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.

Updating your configuration

Ciborg stores your configuration in the file config/ciborg.yml, relative to where you ran ciborg setup. You can update your configuration by running ciborg chef after editing the following keys in this file:

node_attributes

This section contains the basic auth credentials for your EC2 instance and your jenkins build configuration. The jenkins.builds.command field is the shell command that will be run for your build. Here is an example build script for a ruby project:

#!/bin/bash -le

source .rvmrc
set -e
gem install bundler --no-ri --no-rdoc && bundle install
echo USER=$USER && ruby --version && which ruby && which bundle
bundle exec rake spec

recipes

The default chef recipes that ciborg uses are:

["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.

cookbooks

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 that your cookbook_paths is either blank (to use the default values), or contains ./chef/project-cookbooks. So, to include a bacon recipe, you should have cookbooks/pork/recipes/bacon.rb file in your repository.

EC2 Configuration

Ciborg provides a set of default EC2 configuration parameters. For example, the 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. If you want to edit these parameters, you will need to destroy and re-create your ciborg instance.

Manually creating your ciborg instance

1. Launch an instance, allocate and associate an elastic IP and update config/ciborg.yml:

    ciborg create
   

2. Bootstrap the instance using the boostrap_server.sh script. The script installs ruby prerequisites and installs RVM:

    ciborg bootstrap
   

3. Upload the contents of Ciborg's cookbooks, create a soloistrc, and run chef:

    ciborg chef
   

Troubleshooting

Shell access for your instance

ciborg ssh

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

ciborg destroy_ec2

Support

• Check out past discussions on the google groups forum
• Send the list an email at [email protected]
• View the project backlog on Pivotal Tracker
• View the project CI status at ci.pivotallabs.com

License

Ciborg is MIT Licensed and © Pivotal Labs. See LICENSE.txt for details.