radicle-ci-broker/NEWS.md

Release notes for radicle-ci-broker

This file summarizes the user-visible changes to radicle-ci-broker between releases.

Version 0.7.0, released 2024-10-14

This release breaks many existing instances. The event filter configuration needs to be reviewed upon upgrade, and the event queue in the database needs to be emptied before running the new version.

Breaking changes

• Internally, the CI broker now converts change events from the Radicle node into "CI events". In previous versions of the CI broker it used "broker events". CI events are different from broker events, and aim to be more suitable for CI purposes. This also affects the event filter in the CI broker configuration. See the new user guide for details on the CI events.

  Note that in some simple cases, the old broker events match a new CI event exactly, for filtering. As an example, a filter on a specific branch is the same.

  The CI event changes only affect the configuration file and the database. The CI adapters and the messages communicating with them are not affected. Existing adapters work as before.

Bug fixes

• The CI broker no longer logs the sensitive environment variables in clear text. Fix by Michalis.

• The CI broker no longer appends a "shut down" event to the event queue when it loses connection to the local Radicle node. This was a remnant of an old development phase, used to tell other threads in the CI broker to terminate. There is now a better way to do that and the spurious event is not needed. In fact, the spurious event would be processed by the CI broker after it got re-started, meaning the new process would immediately terminate. Ars long, vita brevis.

• The log message of the CI broker process ending with an unrecoverable error is not logged at the error level instead of the info level.

Other changes

• A start of a CI broker user guide (aimed at node operators) has been added to the source repository. It will be published by the CI broker's CI on https://pages.radicle.liw.fi/ci-broker/.

• The CI broker now enables logging in trace and debug levels in release builds.

• CI broker logging level can be set with new --log-level command line option. This functionality was dropped when structured logging was added. Note that the old way of controlling logging level with an environment variable is still absent. Please open an issue if you want it back.

• The CI broker now logs a lot more detail. Possibly too much detail.

• The cibtool event add --base options value is not rev-parsed. This means a value like HEAD or HEAD^ will work. Previously it had to be a commit SHA.

Version 0.6.3, released 2024-09-16

A very small release that I make mostly to keep up a weekly release cadence.

• Fix bug where CI broker would crash (panic) when generating HTML report pages. The cause was that it was assuming that each CI run had a run ID assigned by the CI adapter, and that they were unique. This was a faulty assumption. Luckily, all this code making the assumption had been made superfluous by earlier changes, so it could just be removed. This resulted in further simplification of the report generation code, but those should not be visible to users.

• Add the cibtool event record subcommand, to listen on node events and optionally write them to a file. As this uses the same code as cib to subscribe to node events, it's a way for node operators to verify that the CI broker can actually receive events.

• Add the cibtool event broker subcommand that reads a previously recorded (or constructed) file with node events and produces the corresponding broker events from them. This can be useful to create test files for verifying that event filters work as intended, for node operators.

• Add the cibtool event filter subcommand that reads a set of event filter expressions from one file, and broker events from another file, and writes out the events allowed by the filter. This is meant to be useful for node operators to verify that their event filters work as meant.

Version 0.6.2, released 2024-09-10

A very small release that I make mostly to keep up a weekly release cadence.

• README.md now documents dependencies that aren't Rust crates needed to run the test suite.

• A small bug fix to the acceptance test suite. The dummy adapter used in the suite did not read its stdin, so the adapter would sometimes finish before the CI adapter wrote the trigger message to the adapter's stdin, which failed, causing the whole test to fail.

Version 0.6.1, released 2024-09-02

• This updates the dependencies on other Radicle crates, to make it easier to cargo install the CI broker.

Version 0.6.0, released 2024-09-02

Breaking changes

• The CI broker test suite now verifies that it can be upgraded without making changes to the configuration file or the database. This should lessen how often accidental, unintended breaking changes, so this counts as a user-visible lack of change. Note that this testing doesn't prevent breaking changes from being made, but makes it more likely that they'll be documented as such.

New or changed features

• The CI broker now logs, to its own log, the standard error output of the CI adapter it runs, as well as their exist code. This should make it easier to debug problems in adapters, especially for the developers of the adapters. The log messages look like:

{"msg":"adapter exit code","level":"DEBG","ts":"2024-08-27T17:38:26.762222386Z","exit_code":1}
{"msg":"adapter stderr","level":"DEBG","ts":"2024-08-27T17:38:26.762289242Z","stderr":"woe be me\n"}

• The cibtool event list command now has a --jdon option to output the event queue using the JSON format, for easier post-processing by other software.

• The CI broker logs its git commit when it starts.

• The CI broker README.md lists the known CI adapter, and links to documentation about using them.

Version 0.5.0, released 2024-08-26

Breaking changes

• All CI broker (cib) logging is now to the standard error output as JSON Lines: each log message is on its own line as one JSON object. This is a breaking change as it changes what is logged and how, and this may matter to those consuming the log output.

  The RADICLE_CI_LOG environment variable no longer affects CI broker logging.

• The cibtool run add option --alias has been removed. It was mis-named (repositories have names, not aliases), and also unnecessary, as the program can look up the repository name itself. Related to this, the JSON output calls it repo_name instead of repo_alias. However, when reading run information stored in the database, the old name is still accepted.

New or changed features

• The cibtool run add option --repo can now take a repository name, instead of its id, if there is exactly one repository with that name in the local node.

• The HTML report front page now lists the current queue of unprocessed events, except for events for private repositories. The JSON status page includes the length of the queue.

Version 0.4.0, released 2024-08-19

This is the fourth release. In breaking with tradition, it does not have significant breaking changes.

Breaking changes

• The cibtool run list command now lists only the identifiers of CI runs, one per line, by default. An option --json was added to get all the information in a format that's easy to parse with a program. This is a breaking change if you parse the output of the command with another command.

• The cibtool run add command no longer has a --finished option. It is now enough to use --successful or --failure. The dropped option was always used with one of those two, and those two were always used with the dropped option, so the dropped one was pointless and provided no extra information. It was just extra work for the user.

Bug fixes

• The CI broker handles errors without panicking now. Instead of a stack trace, an actual error message is shown. This may be more friendly to most people.

• The CI broker now depends on Radicle 0.12.0, to say more current with changes in Radicle.

• The cibtool run add command sets the state correctly if the run has finished. Previously it was set to "triggered".

• Several instances of "CI" being spelled as "Ci" have been fixed, in log messages and help texts.

New or changed features

• The HTML report pages produced by the CI broker are now a little more readable.

• The various parts of the running CI broker now notify each other that there have been changes so that the other parts can do what they need to do at once, instead of checking on a fixed schedule. This means, for example, that the HTML report pages for a run are updated at once, instead of once a minute.

• The cib and cibtool commands now both have an option --version to show the version number of the program.

• The cibtool trigger command makes it easier to trigger a CI run. This duplicates the functionality of cibtool event add, but is a little simpler to remember, and a little safer to use. The trigger command makes sure the base commit is always set in the event it creates. (The command to add an event does not, in cases users really want that behavior.)

• Each CI run now has two identifiers: one invented by the CI broker itself, guaranteed to be unique, and one chosen by the adapter, meant to reflect the identifier used by an external CI system, and guaranteed to be unique. Everywhere the user refers to a CI run, either ID is accepted, as long as the adapter one is unambiguous. When a run ID is shown, both kinds are shown.

• During a CI run, when anything happens, the information about the run is updated in the database at once, instead of at the end of the run. This means the change is not lost in case the CI broker is terminated before the run finishes.

• New commands cibtool run show and cibtool run update to show information about a run, and update it. The updating is probably mostly only relevant to those writing test suites for the CI broker.

• Started documenting the acceptance criteria for logging in the CI broker, and how to verify that the criteria are met. This will probably continue over the next few releases. As part of this, the stakeholders are documented. In this release the list of stakeholders is quite rudimentary and the CI broker developers would like to hear from you if you have any wants or needs about the CI broker, whether about logging or otherwise.

  Additionally, this takes the first small steps towards having structured logging.

Version 0.3.0, released 2024-07-18

This is the third release. It breaks all existing installations.

Bug fixes

• The CI broker now parses Git ref names for node identifiers more correctly.

• When the node sends an event about a branch having changed, the CI broker now allows the branch name to have slashes.

New or changed features

• The ci-broker program has been replaced with the cib program, which is better in a few ways. Most importantly, it persists the node events that need to be processed, in a queue, so that they are not lost when the CI broker is re-started. The persistent storage is in the form of an SQLite database file: ci-broker used it already, but cib puts more information in it. There is also a list of all CI runs cib has performed.

• The cibtool program has been added to allow the node operator to manage cib, via the SQLite database file. cibtool lets the operator to view and manipulate the node event queue, and the list of CI runs, and to generate HTML report pages from information in the database. (cib generates the same report pages when running: cibtool functionality is there just in case.)

• CI broker logging continues to be inconsistent and helpful mainly to those developing the CI broker itself. Some logging has been removed, to avoid so called logspam.

• The code has been refactored a lot, for simplicity. This should be invisible to others, especially the adapter implementations, but just in case, be aware something externally visible may have changed inadvertently.

• The BrokerEvent::is_allowed method is no longer exposed in the CI broker public API. If you need it, let us know.

• The CI broker now logs the executable filename of the adapter it runs.

• The acceptance criteria for the CI broker are now documented in more detail in the subplot (see ci-broker.md and the Subplot software). The subplot document is available as HTML.

• Various undocumented helper programs have been dropped from the CI broker. Their functionality, if needed, can be added to cibtool in the future.

Version 0.2.0, released 2024-06-06

This is the second release.

Bug fixes

• The CI broker now picks the newest commit in a patch or branch, rather than the oldest. This means changes to a patch or branch get processed by CI, rather than only the first version. (Lars Wirzenius)

• Error messages are a little clearer now. An unclear error message is a bug. (Lars Wirzenius)

• Problems with the adapter sub-process failing are handled better now. (Lars Wirzenius)

• If the CI broker loses its connection to the Radicle node, the broker now terminates. Previously, it would keep trying to receive a message from the broken connection, which it would never receive, since the connection was broken in a way that it would not be mended even if the node is restarted. Computers are very patient, and never give up hope, so the CI broker was willing to wait until the heat death of the universe, or a power outage, whichever came first.

  Now, something like systemd can be used to restart the CI broker if this happens, and the system will recover. (Lars Wirzenius)

New or changed features

• The CI broker depend on the version of the radicle crate that corresponds to the Radicle (heartwood) version 1.0.0 release candidate 10. This makes it possible to use the CI broker with the current version of Radicle. (Lars Wirzenius)

• The adapter protocol now allows an adapter to give the CI broker a URL related to the CI run. This can be used to link to a build log, for example. (Lars Wirzenius)

• The node event filter now has an AnyPushRef condition. (Michalis Zampetakis)

• The CI broker architecture documentation is now published to https://pages.radicle.liw.fi/ci-broker/architecture.html by CI whenever the CI broker is changed. (Lars Wirzenius)

• The logging for event handling a lot more verbose. This is useful for debugging problems, but is otherwise so noisy logs become nearly useless. (Lars Wirzenius)

• The documentation for the broker/adapter protocol should be up to date. (Michalis Zampetakis)

• The CI broker configuration now has the sensitive_envs field to allow specifying environment variables that should not be logged. (Lars Wirzenius)

• The CI broker can now be shut down cleanly. This is mostly useful for testing, though, at least for now, but opens up the possibility of shutting down only after any in-progress CI runs having finished first. (Lars Wirzenius)

Version 0.1.0, released 2024-04-03

This was the first release. No notes.