radicle-ci-broker/doc/overview.md

Overview of Radicle CI

Radicle CI consists of the following functional components:

• radicle-node (part of heartwood) communicates with other nodes to get updates and sends events when they've been stored in node storage
• cib (part of radicle-ci-broker) receives the events, filters them, and decides when to trigger a CI run
• to execute a CI run, cib spawns an "adapter" as a sub-process; the adapter knows how to execute the CI run with some specific CI system; there's a different adapter for each kind of CI system
• when the adapter process finishes, it tells cib if the run succeeded or failed
• cibtool is a management tool for cib, which can trigger CI to run, tell cib to shut down, and so on

In addition:

• a Radicle repository can contain "job COBs", which are collaborative objects for keeping track of automated "jobs" related to specific commits in the repository, such as CI runs
• the rad-job tool can view or manipulate job COBs; it's part of the radicle-job crate
• the radicle-desktop app is a graphical user interface for managing Radicle repositories; it can show the result of CI runs of commits based on job COBs

The CI process is fundamentally:

• someone pushes a change to their Radicle node
• their node syncs the change to a node that runs CI
• cib decides to execute a CI run for the change
• cib spawns the appropriate adapter
• the adapter does whatever it needs to execute the run
• cib creates or updates a job COB accordingly