Welcome to Taskcluster development!
Taskcluster is composed of a bunch of microservices, some libraries, the React user interface, some client libraries, and a bunch of infrastructure to glue it all together. You will probably be working on only one of these pieces, so read carefully below to see what you need to do.
You will need Node version 18.13.0 installed. We recommend using https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm to support installing multiple Node versions.
We use yarn
to run most development commands, so install that as well.
Go version go1.19.5 is required for some development tasks, in particular to run yarn generate
.
For new contributors not familiar with Go, it's probably safe to skip installing Go for now -- you will see a helpful error if and when it is needed.
We recommend using https://github.com/moovweb/gvm to support installing multiple Go versions.
You do not need Rust installed unless you are working on one of the Rust components of Taskcluster.
The currently-required version of Rust is in rust-toolchain
.
All Taskcluster services require a Postgres 11 server to run.
The easiest and best way to do this is to use docker, but if you prefer you can install a Postgres server locally.
NOTE the test suites repeatedly drop the public
schema and re-create it, effectively deleting all data in the database.
Do not run these tests against a database instance that contains any useful data!
To start the server using Docker:
docker run -ti -p 127.0.0.1:5432:5432 -e POSTGRES_HOST_AUTH_METHOD=trust -e LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF8 -e LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF8 --rm postgres:11
This will run Docker in the foreground in that terminal (so you'll need to use another terminal for your work, or add the -d
flag to daemonize the container) and make that available on TCP port 5432, the "normal" Postgres port.
It can be helpful to log all queries run by the test suite:
docker run -ti -p 127.0.0.1:5432:5432 -e POSTGRES_HOST_AUTH_METHOD=trust -e LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF8 -e LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF8 --rm postgres:11 -c log_statement=all
However you decide to run Postgres, you will need a DB URL, as defined by node-postgres.
For the docker container described above, this is postgresql://postgres@localhost/postgres
.
For tests, set:
export TEST_DB_URL=postgresql://postgres@localhost/postgres
To access the psql command-line prompt in your docker container, determine the container ID (such as with docker container ls
) and run
docker exec -ti $CONTAINER_ID psql -U postgres
To set up the repository, run yarn
in the root directory.
This will install all required dependencies from the Yarn registry.
For some of the commands below, such as mocha
, you will need to make sure that node_modules/.bin
is in your PATH.
To set this up, in the root directory, run
export PATH=$PWD/node_modules/.bin:$PATH
We recommend installing pre-commit for small checks that run before each commit, such as trailing whitespace, making sure files end in a newline, checking for merge conflict strings, etc.
- Install pre-commit
- Install the git hook scripts with
pre-commit install
- Done!
pre-commit
will now run automatically ongit commit
!
These checks will help keep the code clean and will potentially save CI resources if issues are caught pre-commit.
Taskcluster requires a Linux-like environment for development. If you are developing on a Windows system, you will need to either
- install WSL
- use a virtual machine for development or
- install Linux as a second OS and boot into that.
The files comprising the Taskcluster UI are under ui/
.
It relies on a microservice called web-server, which you will need to run in a different terminal window.
To run the Taskcluster UI:
-
In a shell window for taskcluster-web-server:
-
Make sure Postgres is set up as described above.
-
Set both
READ_DB_URL
andWRITE_DB_URL
to the URL for your postgres server, as described above. For example:export READ_DB_URL=postgresql://postgres@localhost/postgres export WRITE_DB_URL=postgresql://postgres@localhost/postgres
-
Set
TASKCLUSTER_ROOT_URL
to point to a Taskcluster deployment you wish to represent in the UI. For example:export TASKCLUSTER_ROOT_URL=https://community-tc.services.mozilla.com
-
Change to the
services/web-server
directory and runyarn start
. This will start a web server on port 3050.Note 1: It will warn "No Pulse namespace defined".
Unless you are working on parts of the UI that require Pulse support (and most do not), this is OK.
Note 2: If you get an error likereadDbUrl is required
, ensure you've set all the above mentioned environment variables in the same shell session.
-
-
In another shell window for taskcluster-ui:
- Change to the
ui/
directory. - Run
yarn
to install the user interface's dependencies. You will only need to do this when the dependencies change. - Run
yarn start
to start the development server. It will output a localhost URL on which you can see the site.
- Change to the
To run all of the tests for a service, change into the directory containing the service (for example, cd services/queue
) and run yarn test
.
Unless you provide additional credentials, some tests will be skipped, but unless you are working on the specific feature addressed by those tests, this is probably OK.
To be sure, follow the TDD practice of writing your tests first, ensuring that they fail before you fix the bug or add the feature.
If your new test is skipped, then consult with one of the Taskcluster team members to see how you can get some credentials.
Otherwise, all tests will run when you make a pull request, and we can address any issues at that time.
If you have a running Postgres server, you can set TEST_DB_URL
to the DB URL determined above.
But for most changes, the mock tests are sufficient to detect errors, and a Postgres server is not necessary.
To run a specific test file, you can use mocha
directly:
# run just the `api_test` file
mocha test/api_test.js
# run the tests in that file until the first failure
mocha -b test/api_test.js
All of the server-side code runs in Node, and uses the debug module to log debugging information. You can see all debugging output with
export DEBUG=*
and can filter out specific debugging output with other values, as described in the module documentation.
If you change the API for a service (even changing documentation), you will need to regenerate the API references.
Happily, this is easy.
In the root directory of the repository, run yarn generate
.
It will change a few files, and you should include those changes in your Git commit.
We generally depend on tests to ensure that services are behaving correctly. It is rare to run a service directly. However, it's possible!
Look in procs.yml
in the service's directory to see what processes you can run.
For example, you might see:
expireArtifacts:
type: cron
schedule: '0 0 * * *'
deadline: 86400
command: node services/queue/src/main expire-artifacts
To run this process locally:
NODE_ENV=development node services/queue/src/main expire-artifacts
You may need to provide additional configuration, either as environment variables or in user-config.yml
.
You can find a template for user-config.yml
in user-config-example.yml
: just copy the latter to the former and edit it.
The client libraries are in clients/
.
All clients contain a great deal of generated code.
Use yarn generate
, as described above, to ensure that any changes you make are not overwritten by the code-generation system.
A Taskcluster deployment is based on a Docker image that contains all Taskcluster services, including the UI. It's rare to use this image during development, as running the image requires lots of credentials and a special environment.
But you're welcome to build the image!
It's easy: yarn build
in the root directory.
Note: you'll need recent version of
docker
withdocker-compose-plugin
|(or alternatively docker-compose)For non-linux systems it is advised to run docker with at least 4 CPU cores and at least 6 GB of memory.
It is possible to run all web services locally using docker compose
.
docker-compose.yml
is being autogenerated with yarn generate
It defines dependencies: postgres
, rabbitmq
, minio
(for S3 artifacts) and all web services.
User names and passwords can be seen in docker-compose.yml
.
# to run all containers
yarn start
# to stop them
yarn stop
# to run only some
docker compose up -d auth-web
# to run any task from entrypoint
docker compose run --rm auth-web worker-manager/expire-workers
Database would be initiated with the help of docker/postgres/init.sql
script and pg_init_db
service which runs migrations.
Minio (S3) will provision two buckets on first start: public-bucket
, private-bucket
. Buckets would be removed and recreated on each restart. If you need to persist buckets please override s3_init_buckets
command.
All services are served through the taskcluster
service which uses docker/nginx.conf
.
UI can be accessed through http://taskcluster (or http://localhost).
To avoid having HAWK authentication issues and be able to see worker logs, modification of /etc/hosts
is necessary with this entry:
127.0.0.1 taskcluster
To login, use static/taskcluster/*
client ids and access tokens that can be seen in AUTH_WEB
environment variable of auth-web
service.
Warning: on linux systems please check that your environment variables
TASKCLUSTER_ROOT_URL
,TASKCLUSTER_CLIENT_ID
andTASKCLUSTER_ACCESS_TOKEN
do not interfere. Docker will use those envs to overwrite generated ones, which might break some functionality.
Running docker compose with docker-compose.dev.yml
allows local development in containers without necessity of restarting them.
Changes in source code will be applied immediately.
This is achieved with the help of mounting source code from host to the container, and using nodemon
for core services and webpack-dev-server
for ui
.
It might take longer for ui
service to start, as it needs to compile application. After that reloads would be fast.
# run ALL containers with local source code mounts as volumes
yarn dev:start
# stop
yarn dev:stop
Note: starting all services in developer mode might be slower and will require extra resources. As alternative you can only start some of the services in development mode:
# first run everything
yarn start
# then start some of the services you want to develop
yarn dev:start queue-web auth-web
# now queue-web and auth-web are started with nodemon and will be live-reloaded when source file will change
# to stop everything
yarn stop
By default yarn start
(docker compose up
) will only start web services and workers. Background tasks and cron jobs do not start with the rest of the services.
If you need to run those services you can use profiles functionality of docker compose
.
Each background and cron job have special profiles defined for them (see docker-compose.yml
):
- service name (
queue
,github
, ...) - job type (
background
,cron
) - service + job type (
queue-cron
,worker-manager-background
, ...)
That can help to run only what is needed:
# start all services + all queue background and cron jobs
export COMPOSE_PROFILES=queue
yarn start
# stop all
yarn stop
# start all services + all cron jobs in development mode
export COMPOSE_PROFILES=cron
yarn dev:start
# stop all
yarn dev:stop
# start all services + background tasks of worker-manager
export COMPOSE_PROFILES=worker-manager-background
yarn start
# stop all
yarn stop
# start only one specific background job by name
yarn start notify-background-handler
Note: although
docker compose
command allows passing profile names through arguments likedocker compose --profile cron up -d
, those services will not be stopped if you rundocker compose down
afterwards. To stop them you would need to use same argumentsdocker compose --profile cron down
.This way using exported environment variable makes compose behaviour more intuitive.
generic-worker
is configured to automatically start with docker compose
and connect to taskcluster using docker-compose/generic-worker
task queue id.
It is possible to create a task in the UI using similar payload:
taskQueueId: docker-compose/generic-worker
...
payload:
command:
- - ls
maxRunTime: 60
...
Please refer to the Github integration manual on how to set it up initially.
Github integration relies on webhook events that will be sent to the endpoint defined in your Github application settings. To be able to test it locally, you'd need to setup a tunnel, so those API calls will reach your dev env.
You can use https://ngrok.com/ for this purpose:
- Sign up for a free account (doesn't work otherwise)
- Download and install ngrok
ngrok config add-authtoken <token>
(found on the settings page- Start it using
ngrok http --host-header=taskcluster taskcluster:80
- Copy the forwarding url and use it for the Github Application settings:
- Callback URL:
https://your-unique-subdomain.ngrok.io
- Webhook URL:
https://your-unique-subdomain.ngrok.io/api/github/v1/github
- Callback URL:
- Use web interface http://127.0.0.1:4040/ to inspect incoming webhooks
Make sure you configure github services in docker compose properly. For this you will need to override following environment variables in your docker-compose.override.yml
:
# Make sure to replace all values if you want to use the code below
services:
github-web:
environment: &ref1
- GITHUB_PRIVATE_PEM="-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----\n<private key>\n-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----\n"
- GITHUB_APP_ID=<application id>
- WEBHOOK_SECRET=<secret or blank>
- LEVEL=debug
- DEBUG=*
github-background-worker:
environment: *ref1
# start everything
yarn start
# start github api handler and background worker in development mode
yarn dev:start github-web github-background-worker
# follow logs
docker compose logs -f github-web github-background-worker
You can use any existing repository or create a new one. Install the application you've configured before to that repository.
In order for Taskcluster to start doing something you need to create .taskclster.yml
in the root of that repository, in the main branch. You can refer to the http://taskcluster/quickstart page to see how this file should look like.
Example of `.taskcluster.yml`
version: 1
reporting: checks-v1
policy:
pullRequests: collaborators
tasks:
- $if: 'tasks_for == "github-push"'
then:
taskQueueId: docker-compose/generic-worker
schedulerId: taskcluster-ui
created: {$fromNow: ''}
deadline: {$fromNow: '1 day'}
payload:
command:
- - /bin/bash
- '-c'
- echo "github-push"; exit 0
maxRunTime: 30
metadata:
name: example-task
description: An **example** task
owner: [email protected]
source: http://taskcluster/tasks/create
else:
$if: 'tasks_for == "github-pull-request"'
then:
taskQueueId: docker-compose/generic-worker
schedulerId: taskcluster-ui
created: {$fromNow: ''}
deadline: {$fromNow: '1 day'}
payload:
command:
- - /bin/bash
- '-c'
- echo "github-pull-request"; exit 0
maxRunTime: 30
metadata:
name: example-task
description: An **example** task
owner: [email protected]
source: http://taskcluster/tasks/create
After this, if you push something or create a pull request, you will start receiving webhook events.
However, static/taskcluster/github
client will not be able to create tasks at this point, since it misses some scopes. For this you will need to visit http://taskcluster/auth/roles page and create new role with name that matches: repo:github.com/<org>/<name>:*
. (see documentation)
It should allow calling queue service, and for the local environment the list of scopes can look like:
queue:create-task:*
queue:route:checks
queue:scheduler-id:*
queue:rerun-task:*