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PR Builder overview

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Mihai PLESA edited this page Sep 12, 2024 · 47 revisions

PR Builder overview

Every PR in brave-core needs to pass a series of automated checks before merging as described below. A list of recently built PRs is at https://ci.brave.com/view/pr/

GitHub overview

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

GitHub checks section

Helpful Jenkins links

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 and nodes allocated to the build

Start a PR builder Jenkins job

To build a PR on demand press on the Build with Parameters link from the Jenkins job view (brave-core-build-pr) or https://ci.brave.com/job/brave-core-build-pr-{PLATFORM}/job/PR-{NUMBER}/ where NUMBER is your PR's number and platform is like android, ios, linux-x64, linux-arm64, macos-x64, macos-arm64, windows-x64, windows-arm64, windows-x86. The following parameters are available:

  • CHANNEL - nightly by default but can be beta or release as well
  • BUILD_TYPE - Static by default but can be Release as well
  • WIPE_WORKSPACE - false by default
  • USE_RBE - true by default
  • SKIP_SIGNING - true by default
  • DCHECK_ALWAYS_ON - true by default
  • NODE_LABEL - empty by default (auto-determined) - machine where to run the build
  • SLACK_NOTIFY - empty by default (auto-set to PR author) - comma-separated list of Slack destinations to notify about build (@user,#build-bot for example)

Jenkins overview

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

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. When a new build starts it will cancel the previously running ones, unless it gets aborted for the following reasons:

  • PR labeled with CI/skip (or platform specific skip labels)
  • PR is in draft

Extra skipping is available per platform using the CI/skip-android, CI/skip-ios, CI/skip-linux-x64, CI/skip-linux-arm64, CI/skip-macos-x64, CI/skip-macos-arm64, CI/skip-windows-x64, CI/skip-windows-arm64, CI/skip-windows-x86 labels for PRs that do not need to run checks on all platforms.

Slack notifications will be sent to PR author based on a map that associates the GitHub user with their corresponding Slack username. This is generated automatically.

Process overview

We use ephemeral nodes in AWS for building Android, Linux and Windows (which get stopped after the build and reused at next one). For iOS and macOS builds we use persistent cloud and physical machines (which means higher chance to re-use workspaces).

This Jenkinsfiles in the devops repo define the steps for building on Android x86, iOS x64, Linux x64, Linux arm64, macOS x64, macOS arm64, Windowx x64, Windowx arm64 and Windowx x86 with the steps below:

  • checkout source code
  • install dependencies (npm install)
  • initialize the repository (across runs we do npm run sync to force fetching the latest code or npm run init if starting with empty workspace)
  • build
  • gn check (npm run gn_check)
  • eslint (npm run eslint)
  • JavaScript tests
  • unit tests and browser tests (npm run test -- brave_unit_tests and npm run test -- brave_browser_tests)
  • upstream tests
  • Storybook build
  • audit network (npm run network-audit)
  • create binaries
  • upload build artifacts to S3 (.apk, .zip, .dmg, .pkg, .deb, .rpm, .exe)
  • report build results and link to artifacts via Slack (to PR author/notify list and #build-downloads-bot)

Besides the platform builds, there are pipelines that do platform-agnostic (noplatform) checks like:

  • test scripts (npm run test:scripts)
  • check if rebased against current Chromium version
  • audit dependencies (npm run audit_deps)

We also use sonarcloud.io for code quality checks.

More info at https://github.com/brave/devops/wiki/Browser-CI-CD

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