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ci_faq.md 2.43 KiB

Continuous Integration (CI) FAQ

Why did my commit fail CI?

On every commit, a script runs that performs a number of things, including compiling code and running unit and functional tests. Whatever you did apparently broke one of these things.

Why should I care about the CI results?

CI immensely streamlines the development cycle by helping us catch bugs immediately, allowing us to fix them early before they plague us (or future users of the code base). It's a common industry practice. If you break the CI pipeline, don't ignore it! Try your best to get the branch back in working condition.

Okay, so my commit failed CI, and I guess I care. What should I do?

  1. Re-run the build.
    • Sometimes something weird happens, so it's good to check this.
  2. Figure out what you did wrong and fix it.
    • If you click on the build, you should be able to see the exact logs of the build process. Debug the error to figure out what went wrong. Maybe you failed a test. You may need to open the source code for the test to see where you failed, which is very insightful into figuring out what went wrong.
  3. Figure out what CI is doing wrong.
    • Sometimes a test might be poorly designed. At this point, it can be really tempting to just ignore the build failure altogether (don't do that!), or just remove the broken test (not as bad, but still don't do that). The best thing is to fix the test so that we continue to have good regression test coverage over our code.

My build failed due to unavailable software. How do I install things on CI?

Each build is run within a docker image. Add whatever software you need on the sudo apt install ... line inside of the .gitlab-ci.yml file in the root directory.

How does CI work?

When a commit is added to a branch in our repository, a notification is sent out to our gitlab-ci-runner, which instructs it to checkout the updated branch and run the directive in .gitlab-ci.yml. It then runs each directive, which is made up of bash scripts to execute. In our case, we run two scripts, ci-build.sh and ci-test.sh, which compile projects and run checks, respectively. Look at these scripts to learn more about how they work. If some error occurs during the script (perhaps a forced error generated by a failed test), then the runner sends a message back to Gitlab indicating that the CI failed. Otherwise, it succeeds.