So you want to give back to the Exim project but don’t know how? Being a member of the Exim BuildFarm is one way you can help. If your distro and version is not on the list that is currently being built, or if your build configuration is drastically different than others with your distro and version, then please consider submitting a request to join the farm. I would also like to point out that the Debian project has excellent Exim coverage on their Experimental Build Farm. We’re not discouraging you from joining the Exim BuildFarm if you’re Debian or Debian derivative, but merely want to acknowledge the excellent job the Debian project already does with it.
You will need to submit an Exim BuildFarm Application and the BuildFarm administration has sent you an email with your machine alias (aka animal) and secret password, which you will enter in step 9 below. If you just want to run the build farm client and never submit the results, you call simply run everything with the –test option and it will go through all defined build/test steps without saving the state anywhere. In that case, if you accidentally run it without –test, the build process will still work, but the build state will be locally recorded, and when the stated is submitted to the server, it will reject the feedback because it’s from an unknown animal.
If you want to run more than one instance of the build farm to test multiple different configurations, such as one with OpenSSL and one with GnuTLS, make a copy of the build-farm.conf template for each subsequent animal simply start at step 9. More details on the extra configuration required to keep it separate from the main build are at the end of this page.
Make sure that all required packages for Exim to build successfully are installed. The minimal package requirements are the basic suite of compiler tools and basic libraries. You will also need to install the ccache package. A set needed for basic build (not including the buildfarm!) of a bulky-configuration Exim on Fedora 27 is: git gcc make pcre-devel libdb-devel libXaw-devel libXt-devel libidn2-devel libidn-devel lmdb-devel sqlite-devel hiredis-devel postgresql-devel mysql-devel openssl-devel openldap-devel perl-ExtUtils-Embed perl-experimental redhat-rpm-config
Create the master exim user (i.e. the user that Exim changes uid to when it runs in normal operation). I suggest the user exim. If you already have the Exim package provided by your distro installed, chances are good that you already have a user named exim, exim4, or Debian-exim. That user is fine. This howto also assumes you use the groupname exim.
Create a user that will run the Build Farm. I suggest the user farm.
It can be your normal login, but be warned: you’ll be giving it passwordless “sudo” permissions.
Due to some assumptions that are made in the test suite, the group name must also be farm. It is ok if you make it a secondary group or the primary group. You also must assign a GeCos name, or some tests will fail. I suggest “Exim BuildFarm”. An example command that should work for most distributions:
useradd -m -c 'Exim BuildFarm' farm
Add exim as a secondary group to the farm user. (You should NOT add farm as a secondary group to the exim user; this will cause test errors.) Here is a sample user/group configuration:
farm@buildclient:~/code$ id farm
uid=1001(farm) gid=1001(farm) groups=1001(farm),137(exim)
farm@buildclient:~/code$ id exim
uid=480(exim) gid=137(exim) groups=137(exim)
Configure sudo to allow user farm to elevate to root without a password. Run visudo and add:
farm ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL. You should check this with
sudo -U farm -l.
Change to the farm user.
Checkout the client code:
git clone git://git.exim.org/buildfarm-client.git code
This will create the repo checkout in the directory ~/code/.
Change into the ~/code/ directory and copy the config template to the default filename:
cp build-farm.conf.template build-farm.conf
Edit the build-farm.conf file and adjust to your local configuration. The only options that absolutely require changing are the animal and secret configuration settings. Your machine’s sysname alias must be assigned to animal and the secret key assigned to secret. The rest of the default build configuration should work to build a basic Exim configuration with no added features/capabilities and it will run the test suite.
Whatever directory is set as the build_root must exist before anything will run. If you didn’t change it, this will be all that’s needed:
mkdir $HOME/buildfarm
CAUTION: Do not ever change anything in the git repo under that is created in $HOME/buildfarm/HEAD/exim/. It will cause the build to fail in the Git-Checkout phase.
Directory permissions must be lax enough for the exim user running the test suite to be able to access the files that user farm has checked out. One recommendation that we know works is to make the farm user’s home directory be both group and world readable and group and world searchable:
chmod og+rx $HOME. Additionally, every subdirectory between / and $HOME/buildfarm should have this permissive access. Some users have reported they must set $HOME/buildfarm to 0775 for the test suite to run. What do these open permissions fix? One thing that tighter permissions will break, for example, is test 0005, because the sudo’d exim process in the test suite will be unable to read that test config file.
Make sure that your umask is 0022: umask 0022. This also will need to be set in any script you call the run_build script.
Test the configure process by running ./run_build --test --verbose=2 --only-steps=configure. If there are errors, you’ll need to correct them until the process succeeds (ends with OK). You can repeat this as many times as necessary because test mode does not store the status of the git repo or the status of each stage of the build.
The test might complain about missing Perl modules. Install these modules.
Test the build process by running ./run_build --test --verbose=2 --only-steps=configure,make. If there are build errors, make adjustments, install additional packages, etc, and repeat the test.
Test the test suite by running ./run_build --test --verbose=2 --only-steps=configure,make,test --override range_num_tests='1 2'. If there are build errors when building the test suite, or runtime errors trying to run the test suite, you may need to install additional packages, e.g. autoconf.
If you enabled the documentation building process in the build-farm.conf, then you can try to build it with ./run_build --test --verbose=2 --only-steps=configure,make-doc. For documentation generation to succeed, it will require extra packages to be installed to support xml, xslt, pdf, and a few other things. Please see the comments on the Building Documentation page.
If you can get past each of these steps, then your build farm system meets the minimum requirements.
The official process can be kicked off by running /home/farm/code/run_cron --run-all. This will run the default build configuration, keep track of the git repository status, and upload the build results to the server.
Once that command runs with no complaints, add it to the farm user crontab. You can run it at whatever frequency you choose, I suggest 2 hours. If a previous instantiation is still running, the script will detect the lockfile and exit so as not to step on each other. Caution: Cron provides a highly sanitized environment to the run_cron script. Depending on your Cron version you may supply a PATH=... line in your crontab, or you need to call a wrapper script around run_cron:
#!/bin/bash
export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:$PATH"
$HOME/code/run_cron --run-all $@
The default tests that are run are a limited set, from 1 to 999. This covers basic Exim functions, but does not exercise a lot of the advanced functions. Once a few cronjob runs complete successfully, increase the range of tests to run. Edit the build-farm.conf file and change the range_num_tests => '1 2', to range_num_tests => '1 5999', and it will run more advanced tests.
As mentioned above, you can start at step 9 for each additional build you’ll do on the same machine. A second application must be filled out to put the appropriate data in the database because this is treated a separate BuildFarm client:
Make a second copy of the build-farm.conf with a different name, such as build-farm-alias2.conf.
Set the path for buildroot and the CCACHEDIR environment settings, each to a new subdirectory from the first configuration.
Create the new build_root directory.
When testing, pass this additional parameter to any build script you run: --config /path/to/build-farm-machine2.conf.
Add a new cron job for this second build farm client in the same way you chose to do the first one, just make sure to specify the –config option with it.