Lando Calrissian relies on Lobot to keep Cloud City afloat, and now you can rely on Lobot to get your continuous integration server running in the cloud. Lobot is a gem that will help you spin-up, bootstrap, and install Jenkins CI for your Rails app on Amazon EC2.

Please note these instructions are the for the prerelease Lobot 2.0. Please report any issues you encounter by opening a github issue.

• Commands for creating, starting, stopping, or destroying your CI server on EC2
• The full Travis CI environment on Ubuntu 12.04
• A Jenkins frontend for monitoring your builds

After you add gem "lobot" to your Gemfile, all you'll need to do is run the following commands:

[lobot configure] - COMING SOON - See Setup for now.
lobot create
lobot bootstrap
lobot add_build BobTheBuild [email protected]:you/some_repo.git master script/ci_build.sh
lobot chef
lobot trust_certificate     # only if you're on a mac

Read on for an explanation of what each one of these steps does.

Add lobot to your Gemfile, in the development group:

gem "lobot", :group => :development

Create a config/lobot.yml file in your project:

---
server_ssh_key: ~/.ssh/id_rsa
github_ssh_key: ~/.ssh/id_rsa
aws_key: <your AWS Key>
aws_secret: <your AWS Secret>
node_attributes:
  jenkins:
    builds: []
  travis_build_environment:
    user: jenkins
    group: nogroup
    home: /var/lib/jenkins
  nginx:
    basic_auth_user: ci
    basic_auth_password: password

See https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/account/index.html?ie=UTF8&action=access-key to generate AWS key/secret.

Then, create a build script in script/ci_build.sh:

#!/bin/bash -l
source .rvmrc

set -e

gem install bundler --no-ri --no-rdoc && bundle install

RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec rake db:migrate
bundle exec rake

In your config/lobot.yml, there are defaults set for values that have the recommened value. For example, the instance size used for EC2 is set to "c1.medium".

You can save on EC2 costs by using a tool like projectmonitor or ylastic to schedule when your instances are online.

Additional Options: keypair_name: The name of the aws key pair (default: "lobot"). If you aren't able to ssh into a new instance, try changing this from lobot to something else.

At this point you will need to create a commit of the files generated or modified and push those changes to your remote git repository so Jenkins can execute the build script when it pulls down your repo for the first time.

If you must, you can do this on a branch. Then later you can change the branch in lobot.yml later and rechef.

You can modify the chef run list by setting the recipes key in config/lobot.yml. The default is:

["pivotal_ci::jenkins", "pivotal_ci::limited_travis_ci_environment", "pivotal_ci"]`

Because we're using the cookbooks from Travis CI, you can look through all the recipes Travis has available, and add any that you need.

1. Launch an instance, allocate and associates an elastic IP and updates config/lobot.yml:

    lobot create
   

2. Bootstrap the instance using the boostrap_server.sh script. The script installs ruby prerequisites and installs RVM:

    lobot bootstrap
   

3. Upload the contents of Lobot's cookbooks, create a soloistrc, and run chef:

    lobot chef
   

Your lobot instance should now be up and running. You will be able to access your CI server at: http://<your instance address>/ with the username and password you chose during configuration. For more information about Jenkins CI, see http://jenkins-ci.org.

If you need to write your own chef recipes to install your project's dependencies, you can add a cookbooks directory to the root of your project. Make sure to delete the cookbook_paths section from your lobot.yml (to use the default values), or add ./chef/project-cookbooks to the cookbook_paths section.

So, to have a bacon recipe, you should have cookbooks/pork/recipes/bacon.rb file in your repository.

Shell access for your instance

lobot ssh

Terminate all Lobot instances on your account and deallocate their elastic IPs

lobot destroy_ec2

Lobot installs the ansicolor plugin, however you need to configure rspec to generate colorful output. One way is to include --color in your .rspec and update your spec_helper.rb to include

RSpec.configure do |config|
 config.tty = true
end

• fog
• ci_reporter
• thor
• hashie
• net-ssh

Please be aware that Lobot uses git submodules. In order to git source Lobot in your Gemfile, you will need the following line:

gem "lobot", :github => "pivotal/lobot", :submodules => true

Lobot is tested using rspec, vagrant and test kitchen. You will need to set environment variables with your AWS credentials to run tests which rely on ec2:

export EC2_KEY=FOO
export EC2_SECRET=BAR

We welcome pull requests. Pull requests should have test coverage for quick consideration. Please fork, make your changes on a branch, and open a pull request.

Lobot is MIT Licensed and © Pivotal Labs. See LICENSE.txt for details.