PR Builder overview

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

GitHub overview

Jenkins overview

brave-browser checks

brave-core checks

Advanced steps

Debugging

Upcoming features

Resources

Every PR in brave-browser or brave-core needs to pass a series of automated checks before merging. The intention of this page is to describe those checks.

GitHub overview

On each PR, you should see the checks section as below (unless it's a draft PR or has the CI/Skip label applied).

Details link will take you to the actual check results (Jenkins private, Travis publicly accessible).

Jenkins overview

We have a private Jenkins server available at https://staging.ci.brave.com (you need VPN and a Jenkins account).

There are two jobs setup under the ci tab:

• brave-browser-build-pr
• brave-core-build-pr

Each of these is setup in Jenkins as a multibranch pipeline. A scan is done every 5 minutes for new changes and (once detected) the job will automatically be queued up. Forks are ignored.

Using the UI, you can go into either one of these and then view Branches and Pull Requests. You can see the history of checks by going into the specific PR or associated branch in Jenkins.

brave-browser checks

The checks that are done are defined in the Jenkinsfile at the root of the project https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/blob/master/Jenkinsfile.

This Jenkinsfile defines the pipeline that builds in parallel for Linux, macOS and Windowx x64 with the steps below:

• initialize the repository (npm install --no-optional, then npm run init if needed and finally npm run sync -- --all)
• run lint (npm run lint)
• build as an official build
• create distributables
• security checks (npm run test-security)
• unit tests and browser tests (npm run test -- brave_unit_tests and npm run test -- brave_browser_tests)
• upload build artifacts to S3 (.dmg file, .deb file, .rpm file, .exe files)

We use ephemeral nodes in AWS for building Linux and Windows x64 (which get shutdown if idle for 30m - if no other builds start on them). For macOS we use physical machines (which means higher chance to re-use workspaces).

brave-core checks

The checks here are executed by calling the brave-browser pipeline as defined in https://github.com/brave/brave-core/blob/master/Jenkinsfile.

To navigate from the brave-core build to the brave-browser one please go to Console Ouput and press the link to it.

This Jenkinsfile defines the pipeline that does:

• create a new branch in brave-browser if it doesn't exist
• pin the brave-core branch in package.json from brave-browser
• if versions from package.json are different between the 2 repos then do a rebase on brave-browser against PR target branch
• waits for 6m for the new branch to be discovered by the brave-browser pipeline
• calls the brave-browser pipeline

Besides the checks done by our Jenkins job, there are some additional checks done via Travis:

• JavaScript lint and unit tests
• security checks
• Python lint (pep8)

Advanced steps

To build a PR on demand press on the Build with Parameters link from the Jenkins job view. The following parameters are available:

• BRANCH - master by default (ignored if you're building a PR)
• CHANNEL - dev by default but can be nightly, beta or release as well
• WIPE_WORKSPACE - false by default
• RUN_INIT - false by default
• DISABLE_SCCACHE - false by default (only on Linux and macOS)
• BUILD_LINUX - true by default
• BUILD_MAC - true by default
• BUILD_WINDOWS_X64 - true by default
• BUILD_WINDOWS_IA32 - false by default
• SKIP_SIGNING - coming soon
• DEBUG - false by default

When on a specific build from the build history there are some helpful links:

• Console Output - view full build output
• Parameters - view parameter values that have been passed to the build (as defined above)
• Test Result - view test results (unit and browser tests together)
• Replay - replay build (with option to alter pipeline)
• Pipeline Steps - best view for seeing the full list of steps and debugging (can view status and output of individual steps)
• Workspaces - view files in the build workspaces

Debugging

Upcoming features

• parameterize build verbosity
• add signing for macOS and Windows
• setup sccache for Windows
• re-enable browser tests on Windows
• add notifications (Slack or e-mail)

Resources

• for employees, join the #brave-core-ci Slack channel
• for external contributors (community), we would like to have the content of these checks be publicly viewable in the future
• additional non-public information is available in the devops wiki