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@title Harbormaster User Guide
@group userguide
Guide to Harbormaster, a build and continuous integration application.
Overview
========
WARNING: Harbormaster is still very rough. Read this document carefully to
understand what it can and can not do and what to expect in the future.
The Harbormaster application provides build and continuous integration support
for Phabricator.
Harbormaster is not a mature application. You should expect it to have major
missing capabilities and to change substantially over time. The current version
of Harbormaster can perform some basic build tasks, but has many limitations
and is not a complete build platform.
In particular, you should be aware of these common limitations:
- **Creating Build Plans**: Harbormaster ships with only very basic, crude
tools for writing build plans. There are no default integrations with
`arc unit` or systems like Jenkins. Build plans are likely to change
substantially over time.
- **Triggering Builds**: Harbormaster can only trigger builds through Herald
rules. It can not currently run periodic builds.
- **Executing Builds**: Harbormaster can only execute builds in a remote
system, like Jenkins. It can not currently host builds.
- **Change Handoff**: Change handoff is covered in rough edges and tradeoffs.
Harbormaster Basics
===================
Use Harbormaster to run builds or tests on code reviews and commits. In general,
the Harbormaster workflow looks like this today:
- You create a new "Build Plan" which describes how to build a project (which
tests to run, which commands to execute, etc).
- You configure Harbormaster to trigger the plan when relevant code reviews
are created or relevant commits are pushed or discovered.
- Harbormaster executes the plan and reports the results, allowing you to see
if a change or commit breaks tests.
The remainder of this document walks through these steps in more detail.
Concepts and Terminology
========================
Harbormaster uses these concepts to describe builds:
- **Build Step**: Describes a single step in a build process, like running a
command.
- **Build Plan**: A collection of build steps which describe a build process.
You'll create build plans to tell Harbormaster which commands it needs to
run to perform a build.
- **Buildable**: A reference to an object from another application which can
have builds run against it. In the upstream, code reviews (from
Differential) and commits (from Diffusion) are buildable.
- **Build**: Created by running a build plan against a buildable. Collects
results from running build commands and shows build progress, status and
results. A build describes what happened when an entire build plan was
run.
- **Build Target**: Builds are made up of build targets, which are created
automatically when Harbormaster runs the individual steps in a build. A
build target describes what happened when a specific build step was run.
Creating a Build Plan
=====================
NOTE: Build plans are currently crude and subject to change in future versions
of Harbormaster.
A build plan tells Harbormaster how to run a build: which commands to run,
services to call, and so on. Builds start with a build plan.
To create a build plan, navigate to {nav Harbormaster > Manage Build Plans >
New Build Plan}.
Build plans are composed of "Build Steps". Each step describes an individual
action (like running a command) and the sequence of steps as a whole comprise
the plan. For example, you might want to run one command to build a binary,
then a second command to execute unit tests. Add steps to your build plan
with {nav Add Build Step}.
Currently, the only useful type of build step is "Make HTTP Request", which you
can use to make a call to an external build system like Jenkins. Today, most
plans should therefore look something like this:
- Use a "Make HTTP Request" step to tell Jenkins or some other similar
external build system about the code.
- Have the build step "Wait for Message" after the external system is
notified.
- Write custom code on the build server to respond to the request, run a
build, then report the results back to Phabricator by calling the
`harbormaster.sendmessage` Conduit API.
You'll need to write a nontrivial amount of code to get this working today.
In the future, Harbormaster will become more powerful and have more builtin
support for interacting with build systems.
Triggering Builds
=================
NOTE: Harbormaster can not currently watch a branch (like "build 'master' every
time it changes") or run periodic builds (like "build every hour"). These
capabilities may be added in the future.
You can run builds manually by using {nav Run Plan Manually} from the detail
screen of a build plan. This will execute a manual build immediately, and can
be used to test that plans work properly.
To trigger a build automatically, write a Herald rule which executes the "Run
build plans" action. The simplest rule would just use the "Always" condition
and run a single build plan, but you can use more complex conditions to control
which plans run on which code.
This action is available for commits and revisions, as either can be built
with Harbormaster. This action is only available for "Project" or "Global"
rules.
Change Handoff
==============
NOTE: Change handoff is currently very rough. It may improve in the future.
If you want to build code reviews in an external system, it will need to be
able to construct a working copy with the changes before it can build them.
There are three ways to do this:
- **Automatic Staging Areas**: Recommended. This is the simplest and
cleanest way to hand changes to an external build system.
- **Manual Staging Areas**: Recommended if you can not use automatic
staging areas. This is a simple way to hand changes to an external build
system, but not as clean as automatic staging areas.
- **`arc patch`**: Not recommended. This mechanism is the most difficult to
configure and debug, and is not nearly as reliable as handoff via staging
areas.
With staging areas, `arc` pushes a copy of the local changes somewhere as a
side effect of running `arc diff`. In Git, it pushes changes to a tag like
`phabricator/diff/123` in a designated remote.
The build system can then interact with this copy using normal VCS commands.
This is simpler to configure, use, troubleshoot and work with than `arc patch`.
With `arc patch`, the build system downloads patches from Phabricator and
applies them to a local working copy. This is more complex and more error-prone
than staging areas.
**Automatic Staging Areas**: This is the recommended mechanism for change
handoff. This mechanism has not been built yet, so you can not use it.
**Manual Staging Areas**: If you can not use automatic staging areas, manual
staging areas are the next best approach. Manual staging areas are only
supported under Git, but work with both hosted and imported repositories.
Manual staging areas work like this:
- You configure a staging area for the repository you want to be able to
run builds for. A staging area is just a remote repository that you're
designating for temporary storage.
- Once a staging area is configured, `arc diff` will automatically push a
copy of the changes to the staging area as a side effect when creating
and updating reviews.
- Your build system can pull changes directly from the configured staging
area.
Configure a staging area by navigating to {nav Diffusion >
(Choose a Repository) > Edit Repository > Edit Staging}. You'll enter the
remote URI of a repository to use as a staging area, and `arc diff` will push
changes to tags like `phabricator/diff/123`.
There are several ways to select a staging area:
- You can use the repository itself as its own staging area, but this will
clog it up with a lot of tags that users probably don't care about. This is
simplest to configure but will be disruptive and potentially confusing to
users.
- You can create a single staging repository and have all other
repositories use it as a staging area. This is simple to configure and
won't disrupt or confuse users, but you won't be able to set granular
permissions on the staging repository: all the staged changes in a
repository are visible to anyone who has access to the repository, even if
they came from a repository that the viewer does not have access to.
- You can create a staging repository for each standard repository. This will
give you the most control, but is also the most time consuming to configure.
- You can use a hybrid approach and have several staging repositories, each
of which is used for one or more standard repositories. This will let you
strike a balance between setup costs and granularity.
- Using automatic staging areas avoids all this complexity by using the
repository as its own staging area but hiding the tags from users.
Once you've configured a staging area, have your build system clone the staging
area repository and do a checkout of the relevant tag in order to perform a
build.
**`arc patch`**: You can also have the build system pull changes out of
Phabricator as patches and apply them with `arc patch`. This mechanism is the
most complex to configure and debug, and is much less reliable than using
staging areas. It is not recommended.
To use `arc patch`-based handoff, install PHP on your build server and set up
`arc`. Create a "bot" user for your build system and generate a Conduit token
in {nav Settings > Conduit API Tokens}. Then have your build system clone the
repository and run `arc patch` to apply the changes:
$ arc patch --conduit-token <token> --diff <diff-id>
This will usually work, but is more complex and less reliable than using a
staging area.
Troubleshooting
===============
You can troubleshoot Harbormaster by using `bin/harbormaster` from the command
line. Run it as `bin/harbormaster help` for details.
In particular, you can run manual builds in the foreground from the CLI to see
more details about what they're doing:
phabricator/ $ ./bin/harbormaster build D123 --plan 456 --trace
This may help you understand or debug issues with a build plan.

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