Bricklayer builds packages to help you automate builds and upload them to repositories.

Bricklayer uses twisted to serve a restful interface as well as the scheduler interface, it also needs Redis 2.6 or higher to store projects. Depending on the linux/unix flavor, you have to install Redis by yourself since not all the distros include redis-2.6 yet.

Python modules:

• twisted
• yaml
• redis

Bricklayer has a debian directory ready to be built. To do so under a debian-based system just run (after install Redis):

export PYTHONPATH="."
apt-get -y install build-essential devscripts cdbs python-twisted python-setuptools python-simplejson redis-server
apt-get -y install python2.5-dev && easy_install multiprocessing ## if using Python 2.5 ##
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot # (inside the project directory)
dpkg -i ../bricklayer*.deb # were * is your architecture and version

Bricklayer has a restful interface that accepts the following parameters:

For projects:

POST /project:
  name="bricklayer" # The project name
  version="1.0-1"   # Initial version (will be incremented by each git commit or hudson git tag)
  git_url="git://host/project/repository.git" # Repository URL to watch
  branch="master"  # Branch to follow
  build_cmd="make"  # Command within your project that generate binaries or prepare your project to be installed
  install_cmd="make install PREFIX=debian/tmp" # A command within your project that install the generated binaries
  respository_url="ftp.location.com" # A ftp package repository that your package will be uploaded
  repository_user="a_user" # ftp user for this repository
  repository_passwd="a_g00dP455w0rd" # needless to explain

GET /project/project_name:
  Return the attributes of the project in JSON format

POST /build/project_name
  branch="master" # inform the branch that will schedule a build

GET /build/project_name
  Return an array of completed builds

GET /log/project_name/build_number
  Return the logfile for the given build number

For groups:

POST /group:
  name="group" # The group name
  repo_addr="repository_url" # The package repository URL
  repo_user="user" # The package repository user
  repo_passwd="p4ssw0rd" # The package repository password

To run bricklayer for development you need some tools.

Firstly install redis-server

apt-get -y install redis-server

If you already have python installed, you can use pip for twisted:

pip install twisted

Use python path on the current directory, so the namespace will be acessible:

export PYTHONPATH="."

Point the bricklayer config file to the local one:

export BRICKLAYERCONFIG=etc/bricklayer/bricklayer.ini

Run the scheduler to clone/pull projects and schedule new builds

twistd -ny bricklayer/service.py

Run rest interface to be able to access the web interface

twistd -ny bricklayer/rest.py

Run the bricklayer consumers that will consume the schedule and generates packages

python bricklayer/build_consumer.py

Bricklayer uses RVM to handle multiple ruby projects to be built in the same machine. To use rvm you must provide a .rvmrc or .rvmrc.example (if you don’t want a .rvmrc hanging on your project repository) using the rvmrc syntax as usual. It is highly recommended that you use this if you are building multiples projects using different ruby versions.

It is important to note that bricklayer itself does nothing (beside watch your repository for tags and changes) but do what you told him to do, that means, if your project doesn’t has enough automation to be able to pack itself by using scripts or make-like tasks the very best bricklayer can do is to provide templates that will copy everything in your project directory to a specific installation directory, still a package will be generated but no customizations will be made so BE AWARE and automate your project right way :D