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Basic Builder

Basic Builder (bbuilder) is an extraordinarily simple CI tool. Send it webhooks from a Git management system (e.g. Gitea) and it will perform a basic set of tasks on your repository in response.

Tasks are specified in the .bbuilder-tasks.yaml file in the root of the repository. The specific events to operate on can be configured both from the webhook side, as well as via the YAML configuration inside the repository. A task can be any shell command which can be run by Python's os.system command.

How Basic Builder works

At its core Basic Builder has two parts: a Flask API for handling webhook events, and a Celery worker daemon for executing the tasks.

The Flask API portion listens for webhooks from a compatible Git system, and the Celery worker then takes that request, clones the repository to a working directory, checks out the relevant ref, reads the tasks from .bbuilder-tasks.yaml for the current event type, executes the task commands sequentially, then cleans up the working directory (no artifacts are preserved; this is up to the tasks).

Why?

I recently moved my Git repositories from a GitLab instance to Gitea. While I love Gitea, I missed the simplicity of GitLab CI. For most of my CI tasks, I'm running one or two simple commands or shell scripts on a single runner system, and I found that all the other CI tools out there were too big, cumbersome, and complex for my very simple needs. Thus, I created Basic Builder to do exactly what I need my CI to do, and nothing more. Hopefully it's useful to someone else as well!

Dependencies

  1. Redis or another Celery-compatible broker system is required for the communication between the API and the worker(s).

  2. The Python dependencies can be installed via pip install -r requirements.txt.

Using Basic Builder

  1. Help, as with all Click applications, can be shown with the -h/--help flags. The help output of the root showing the configurable global options is:

    $ bbuilder --help
Usage: bbuilder [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Basic Builder (bbuilder) CLI

Options:
  --version
  -b, --broker TEXT    Celery broker URI. Envvar: BB_BROKER  [default: redis://127.0.0.1:6379/0]
  -w, --work-dir TEXT  Directory to perform build tasks. Envvar: BB_WORK_DIR  [default: /tmp/bbuilder]
  -d, --debug          Enable debug mode. Envvar: BB_DEBUG
  -h, --help           Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  run     Run the Basic Builder server.
  worker  Run a Basic Builder worker.

  2. Run the API with the following command:

    $ bbuilder run

    The full help output of the run command is:

    Usage: bbuilder run [OPTIONS]

  Run the Basic Builder server

Options:
  -a, --listen-addr TEXT  Listen on this address. Envvar: BB_LISTEN_ADDR  [default: 0.0.0.0]
  -p, --listen-port TEXT  Listen on this port. Envvar: BB_LISTEN_PORT  [default: 7999]
  -k, --auth-key TEXT     An authentication key to secure webhook access. Envvar: BB_AUTH_KEY
  -h, --help              Show this message and exit.

    By default, the API will listen on 0.0.0.0:7999; you may change this with the -a/--listen-addr and -p/--listen-port options, for example:

    $ bbuilder run --listen-addr 127.0.0.1 --listen-port 4000

    NOTE: The API server does not use TLS/HTTPS. If you need TLS, which you do if this webhook will traverse the public Internet, add a TLS-terminating reverse proxy in front of the API.

    If you wish to secure your webhooks (and you should), use the --auth-key option to set a password.

  3. Run a worker with the following command:

    $ bbuilder.py worker

    The full help output of the worker command is:

    Usage: bbuilder worker [OPTIONS]

  Run a Basic Builder worker

  Note: If '-s'/'--ssh-key'/'BB_SSH_KEY' is not specified, Basic Builder will attempt to clone repositories over
  HTTP(S) instead. They must be publicly accessible without anthentication in this case.

Options:
  -c, --concurrency INTEGER  The concurrency of the Celery worker. Envvar: BB_CONCURRENCY  [default: 1]
  -k, --ssh-key TEXT         An SSH private key (deploy key) to clone repositories. Envvar: BB_SSH_KEY
  -h, --help                 Show this message and exit.

    NOTE: The worker runs with concurrency=1 by default, so all jobs will be run sequentially in the order they are sent. To allow for higher load, consider setting the -c/--concurrency setting to a higher value. Note however that this may cause some jobs, for instance during release creation (where there is a Push, a Create, then a Release), to occur out of order. If this ordering matters for your tasks, consider leaving this as the default.

    NOTE: If you have tasks that take a long time to run, even with higher concurrency, you may have delayed tasks. If you have a repository with a lot of long-running tasks, it may be best to provision it a dedicated Basic Builder API and worker pair.

  4. Configure your Git system to send webhooks for the event(s) and repositories you want to the Basic Builder API.

  5. Optionally, configure Basic Builder to run under Systemd via the example configurations.

Webhook Configuration

NOTE: Currently, Basic Builder supports only Gitea webhooks. However, other systems may be supported in the future.

Webhooks are sent to Basic Builder in JSON POST format, i.e. POST method and application/json content type.

The URL that is used for the webhook should be in the following format:

http://runnerhost:7999/event/<CI SYSTEM>

For example, assuming your runner host is runner1, port is the default of 7999, and you are using Gitea, the URL would be:

http://runner1:7999/event/gitea

If you are using an authentication key, ensure you set this in your Webhook configuration as well.

Normally, Basic Builder should be sent only "Repository Events" type webhook events, and only the following events are handled by Basic Builder:

  • "Push": A normal push to a branch.

  • "Create": The creation of a tag.

  • "Release": The creation or editing of a release.

NOTE: Basic Builder is, as the name implies, extremely basic. These 3 are very likely the only 3 event types we will support. If you require more, a more complex CI system is what you're looking for.

.bbuilder-tasks.yaml

Within each repository configured for Basic Builder must be a .bbuilder-tasks.yaml configuration.

For example, the following .bbuilder-tasks.yaml specifies a simple set of echo tasks to run on push, Tag create, and Release published events:

---
bbuilder:
  push:
    - echo pushed
  create:
    - echo created
  release:
    published:
      - echo published

You can extrapolate from here how to leverage Basic Builder to perform other tasks you may want on your repository. Each section is optional; if Basic Builder doesn't find any relevant tasks, it simply won't execute anything.

NOTE: The commands specified in .bbuilder-tasks.yaml are always run relative to the root of the repository on the relevant ref, either a branch for push events, or a tag for create or release events.

NOTE: The commands specified in .bbuilder-tasks.yaml are run with the privileges of the bbuilder worker process. Normally, this should not be root, but if it does need to be, be very careful and remember that Basic Builder is implicitly trusting the content of this configuration in all repositories it is configured for.

Cloning Repositories

The Basic Builder worker will, by default, attempt to clone repositories via HTTP(S). This may cause problems if the repository is private however. To work around this, Basic Builder supports depoy keys, i.e. dedicated SSH keypairs that the system can use to clone a repository over SSH instead of HTTP(S).

To activate this functionality, you can use the -k/--ssh-key option to the bbuilder worker command or the BB_SSH_KEY environment variable to set a path to an SSH private key which will be used.

This key should be kept secure and only readable by the Basic Builder user.

On the repository side, the key should be added as a deploy key (e.g. in Gitea, under the repository Settings -> Deploy Keys) for the specific repositories that require it.

Note that enabling deploy keys in the worker will require all repositories using it to be configured with the key, as that Basic Builder worker will use SSH for all repositories.