Description

CiMonitor is a CI display aggregator. It displays the status of multiple Continuous Integration builds on a single web page. The intent is that you display the page on a big screen monitor or TV so that the status of all your projects' builds are highly visible/glanceable (a "Big Visible Chart"). CiMonitor currently supports:

• Cruise Control
• Hudson
• TeamCity

We use CiMonitor internally at Pivotal Labs to display the status of the builds for all our client projects. We also have an instance of CiMonitor running at ci.pivotallabs.com that we use for displaying the status of the builds of various open source projects - both of projects Pivotal Labs maintains (such as Refraction) and of non-Pivotal projects (such as Rails).

Installation

Get the code

CiMonitor is a Rails application. To get the code, execute the following:

git clone git://github.com/pivotal/cimonitor.git pivotal_cimonitor
cd pivotal_cimonitor
bundle install

Initial Setup

We have provided example files for database.yml, auth.yml, and site_keys.rb. Run the following to automatically generate these files for you:

rake setup

You likely need to edit the generated files. See below.

Set up the database

You'll need a database. Create it with whatever name you want. If you have not run rake setup, copy database.yml.example to database.yml. Edit the production environment configuration so it's right for your database:

cp config/database.yml.example config/database.yml
<edit database.yml>
RAILS_ENV=production rake db:create
RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate

Auth support

Adding, editing and removing projects through the UI requires authentication.

If you have not run rake setup, copy auth.yml.example to auth.yml.

cp config/auth.yml.example config/auth.yml

The site can be configured to use Google OpenId or to use the RestfulAuthentication plugin.

Google OpenId setup

This setup requires you to have Google apps set up for your domain.

In your config/auth.yml set the auth_strategy to openid. Then set the openid_identifier, openid_realm, and openid_return_to fields as appropriate for your domain.

Restful Authentication (password) setup

In the config/auth.yml set the auth_strategy to password, and edit the rest_auth_site_key to be something secret.

Set up cron

Add a cron job at whatever frequency you like for the following command:

RAILS_ENV=production rake cimonitor:fetch_statuses > fetch_statuses.log 2>&1

This is what goes out and hits the individual builds. We find that if you do this too frequently it can swamp the builds. On the other hand, you don't want CiMonitor displaying stale information. At Pivotal we set it up to run every 3 minutes. Also, make sure that you set your PATH correctly in crontab to include the 'bundle' executable.

Start the application

Execute:

nohup script/server -e production & > cimonitor.log 2> &1

Configuration

Each build that you want CiMonitor to display is called a "project" in CiMonitor. You need to login to set up projects.

Create a user

CiMonitor can use either the Restful Authentication plugin, or Google OpenId for user security. If you are using Google OpenId, users will be automatically provisioned. All users from your domain will be permitted to edit projects. Otherwise, use the following steps to add users by hand.

Your first user must be created at the command line.

script/console production
User.create!(:login => 'john', :name => 'John Doe', :email => '[email protected]', :password => 'password', :password_confirmation => 'password')

After that, you can login to CiMonitor with the username and password you specified and use the "New User" link to create additional users.

Log in

Open a browser on CiMonitor. Login by clicking on "Login" in the upper-right corner.

Add projects

Click on "Projects" in the upper-right corner. Click on "New Project" and enter the details for a build you want to display on CiMonitor. The "Name", "Project Type", and "Feed URL" are required. If your Feed URL is http://myhost.com:3333/projects/MyProject, then your RSS URL is probably http://myhost.com:3333/projects/MyProject.rss.

TeamCity

To configure TeamCity:

• Choose Team City Rest Project for the project type
• URL looks like: http://teamcity:8111/app/rest/builds?locator=running:all,buildType:(id:bt*) where * is the buildTypeId from the TeamCity Build Configuration.
• Requires a username and password that match a valid account in TeamCity with access to the Build Configuration.

NOTE: The Cradiator-TeamCity-Plugin is deprecated. Please use the Team City Rest Project configuration, which is natively supported by TeamCity 5+.

Optionally, if your Build system is behind Basic Authentication or Digest Authentication, you can enter the credentials.

If you want to temporarily hide your build on CiMonitor, you can uncheck the "Enable" checkbox.

CiMonitor's main display page is at /. You can always get back there by clicking on the "Pivotal Labs" logo at the upper left.

Display

Just open a browser on /. The page will refresh every 60 seconds. When it refreshes, it shows whatever status was last fetched by the cron job. That is, a refresh doesn't cause the individual Builds to be polled.

CiMonitor shows a big green check or a big red X to indicate a build's status. In addition, it shows the history of a project's builds: the previous 9 are displayed underneath as green or red dots. The larger the dot, the more recent the build.

CiMonitor looks good on an iPhone, by the way :)

Notifications

CiMonitor can inform you of builds that have been red for more than 24 hours. Set up cron to daily execute:

RAILS_ENV=production rake cimonitor:red_over_one_day_notification > red_over_one_day_notification.log 2>&1

Tags

You can enter tags for a project (separated by commas) on the project edit page. You can then have CiMonitor display only projects that match a set of tags by going to /?tags=tag1,tag2

Skins

You can skin the CiMonitor dashboard by adding a layout to app/views/layouts/skins, and associated static assets in public/skins. View your skinned dashboard at http://myhost.com:3333/?skin=my_skin_name.

We have included an example skin - 'dark', which is great for dashboards with fewer projects.

CI

CI for CiMonitor is here, and it's aggregated at ci.pivotallabs.com (that's an instance of CiMonitor, of course).

Development

The public Tracker project for CiMonitor is here.

To run tests, run: rake setup rake spec

Copyright (c) 2010 Pivotal Labs. This software is licensed under the MIT License.