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Jake Hunsaker edited this page Jun 7, 2023 · 1 revision

What is Cirrus CI?

Cirrus CI is the provider sos uses to run our test suite for new PRs. Whenever a new PR is opened (as long as it is not a draft PR), Cirrus launches a set of tasks to setup a matrix of testing instances in Google Cloud Engine, copies the PR branch there, runs the test suite, and then reports the results back to GitHub.

The ability to run instances in GCE is funded by Red Hat. Direct control over the GCE and Cirrus projects for sos is currently vested in project maintainers working for Red Hat.

How are Cirrus tasks defined?

Cirrus uses the .cirrus.yml file in the repo to source the configuration of how our tests are run. Forks of the main repo do not inherit the ability to run tasks via Cirrus, even if the configuration file is modified in the fork.

Within .cirrus.yml, tasks are defined via top-level task elements, for example:

# Run a simple lint on the community cluster
flake8_task:
    alias: "flake8_test"
    name: "Flake8 linting test"
    container:
        image: alpine/flake8:latest
    flake_script: flake8 sos

The above task starts a container on Cirrus' community cluster to run flake8 on the PR to ensure PEP8 compliance. The main action(s) of a task is defined by script elements, in the above case flake_script. Cirrus will run any _script elements in defined order as part of the task.

For more information on how Cirrus tasks can be defined, please see the official Cirrus documentation.

Our test suite (see How to write a Test) is run via a task for each stage we've defined tests for, and for each distribution we have defined support and have contributors for.

As of this writing, sos leverages cirrus to run tests on:

  • CentOS Stream
  • Fedora
  • Ubuntu
  • Debian (Foreman tests only)

RHEL testing is handled downstream by Red Hat currently, however contributors should feel comfortable with tests passing for CentOS Stream if their contributions are primarily aimed at RHEL.

If you would like to add distributions to the testing matrix, please open an issue requesting as much. While there are no hard and fast requirements for adding a distribution to the matrix, there is a cost associated with every distribution tested so the project asks for a level of continued contribution in order to add a distribution to automated testing.

A Cirrus task failed with my PR, but it doesn't look related to my changes

Occasionally, tasks will fail to start or hit some other internal-to-cirrus issue. When this happens the maintainers will usually come through and restart the jobs before long. However, if it has been more than a day or two since your PR was opened/updated and there is still a failure in the test suite due to a Cirrus issue, please simply tag one of the maintainers (e.g. @turboturtle) and ask for the job(s) to be restarted.

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