Stoplight

Introduction

Stoplight is a build monitoring tool that is largely based off greenscreen, but is much improved and expandable. To quickly name a few, Stoplight has:

• built-in support for Jenkins
• built-in support for Travis-CI
• custom provider support
• community contributions
• full test suite
• resuable DSL

Stoplight is designed to be displayed on large television screens or monitors. It automatically resizes to fill the maximum real estate the screen can offer.

Installation

Stoplight is a Rack application, so you'll need to install Ruby and Rubygems before you can run Stoplight. Stoplight requires Ruby 1.9.x.

Start by cloning the application repository:

git clone [email protected]:customink/stoplight.git

And then bundle all the application's dependencies:

bundle install

Next, copy the config/servers.example.yml file to config/servers.yml:

cp config/servers.example.yml config/servers.yml

If you want to get up and running quickly and just see what Stoplight looks like, add the following to your configuration file. It will pull data from the public repos of the Travis CI project itself:

-
  type: 'travis'
  url: https://api.travis-ci.org
  build_url: https://travis-ci.org
  owner_name: travis-ci

Start the server with the rackup command:

rackup ./config.ru

Navigate to http://localhost:9292 and check it out! You should see the status of a bunch of builds. The screen will refresh every 15 seconds to keep itself up to date.

Configuration

All configuration options are specified through the config/servers.yml file we copied over before. There's significant documentation in that file on how to configure your servers.

All servers must specify a type option. This tells Stoplight what provider it should use. For example, if you are using Travis CI, your provider is Travis and the server type is travis. If you were using a custom server, the configuration might look like:

-
  type: 'my_server'
  url: '...'

This would look for a provider named MyServer under lib/stoplight/providers. For more information on writing a custom provider, see the Contributing section.

If you have a lot of projects, you may want to selective display them on Stoplight. Luckily, this is just a simple configuration option. To ignore certain projects, just add the ignored_projects field to the config. It even supports regular expressions:

-
  type: 'travis'
  url: 'http://api.travis-ci.org'
  ignored_projects:
    - /^rails-(.*)$/
    - some_other_project

Conversely, you can choose to only show certain projects with the projects option:

-
  type: 'jenkins'
  url: 'http://jenkins.mycompany.com/cc.xml'
  projects:
    - /^public-(.*)$/
    - some_other_project

Configuration for Travis CI

For public repos on travis-ci.org use the sample config provided (see above).

For private repos on travis-ci.com, you will need an access token for the Travis CI api. As the corresponding API endpoints have not been implemented yet, the easiest way is to first create a Github access token and then use this to generate a Travis CI access token:

• Get a GitHub access token (see this GitHub help page)
• Send a POST request to https://api.travis-ci.com/auth/github with the github token as the github_token parameter:

curl -d "github_token=your-github-token" https://api.travis-ci.com/auth/github

• Use the token from the response as the value for "access_token" in your servers.yml file.

Contributing

The development environment is configured with all kinds of goodies like Spork, Guard, and Foreman. If you're developing, just run foreman start and code! As you write tests and code, Guard will run the tests, Spork will make it fast, and Growl will tell you if they passed or failed!

Providers

One of the larger goals of Stoplight was to server the open source community. As more Continuous Integration servers emerge, we needed a common DSL for interacting with them. This all arose when we wanted to add Travis CI support to Greenscreen. Greenscreen was written for CI's that conform to a standard that doesn't even exist anymore. Stoplight doesn't care how the data comes in from the provider!

A Provider is really just a ruby class that defines two methods:

class MyProvider < Provider
  def provider
    'my provider'
  end

  def projects
    # logic here
  end
end

The provider method is just a utility method that returns the name of the provider. The projects method is the "magical" method. This is where a developer parses the data into the given specification. You should take a look in lib/stoplight/providers/sample.rb for a good starting point.

Views/Styles/Layouts

If you are looking to change the design, add styles or javascripts, you'll need to know a little bit about the architecture of the application.

• All javascript should be written in coffeescript. The coffeescript files live in app/assets/javascripts. They are compiled to public/javascripts.
• All css should be written in scss + compass. The scss files live in app/assets/stylesheets. They are compiled to public/stylesheets.

Deployment

Deploying Stoplight to Heroku is a snap.

Of course, if your build servers aren't publicly accessible, Heroku won't be a great option. A Chef Cookbook for deploying Stoplight is available on the Opscode Community site. You can read more about both options in Nathen Harvey's blog. Note that, in his post, Nathen talks about Greenscreen. Stoplight can be deployed in the same manner.

William Durand also ported a Puppet Module for installing Stoplight.

Credits

• GreenScreen was original developed by martinjandrews.
• The former version of GreenScreen was a fork of the updates made by rsutphin.
• This version of Stoplight was written by sethvargo