Debian Continuous Integration

The Debian continuous integration (debci) is an automated system that coordinates the execution of automated tests against packages in the Debian system. debci will continuously run autopkgtest test suites from source packages in the Debian archive.

FAQ for package maintainers

How do I get my package to have its test suite executed?

Test suites must be included in source packages as defined in the DEP-8 specification. In short.

The fact that the package has a test suite must be declared by adding a Testsuite: autopkgtest entry to the source stanza in debian/control.
tests are declared in debian/tests/control.

Please refer to the DEP-8 spec for details on how to declare your tests.

How exactly is the test suite executed?

Test suites are executed by autopkgtest. The version of autopkgtest used to execute the tests is shown in the log file for each test run.

How often are test suites executed?

The test suite for a source package will be executed:

when any package in the dependency chain of its binary packages changes;
when 1 month is passed since the test suite was run;

What exactly is the environment where the tests are run?

debci is designed to support several text execution backends. The backend used for a test run is displayed in the corresponding log file.

For the schroot backend:

The test chroot is a clean chroot, created with debootstrap with no extra arguments.
dpkg is configured to use the --force-unsafe-io option to speed up the installation of packages.
The chroot uses the debci profile, installed by the debci package.

How can I reproduce the test run locally?

NOTE: if you intend to run tests frequently, you should consider installing apt-cacher-ng before anything else. debci will notice the running proxy and will setup the testbed to use it, so you won't have to wait for the download of each package more than once.

Install a configure debci

$ sudo apt install debci
$ sudo debci setup

Now edit /etc/schroot/chroot.d/debci-SUITE-ARCH (by default SUITE is unstable and ARCH is your native architecture), and add your username to the users, root-users and source-root-users configuration keys:

[...]
users=debci,$YOUR_USERNAME
[...]
root-users=debci,$YOUR_USERNAME
source-root=users=debci,$YOUR_USERNAME
[...]

To speed up test suite execution, you can also add the following line at the end:

union-overlay-directory=/dev/shm

This will mount the chroot overlay on tmpfs which will make installing test dependencies a lot faster. If your hard disk is already a SSD, you probably don't need that. If you don't have a good amount of RAM, you may have problems using this.

The following examples assume:

the schroot debci backend
suite = unstable (the default)
architecture = amd64

To run the test suite from a source package in the archive, you pass the package name to adt-run:

$ adt-run --user debci --output-dir /tmp/output-dir SOURCEPACKAGE --- schroot debci-unstable-amd64

To run the test suite against a locally-built source package, using the test suite from that source package and the binary packages you just built, you can pass the .changes file to adt-run:

$ adt-run --user debci --output-dir /tmp/output-dir \
  /path/to/PACKAGE_x.y-z_amd64.changes \
  schroot debci-unstable-amd64

For more details, see the documentation for the autopkgtest package.

Reporting Bugs

Please report bugs against the debci package in the Debian BTS.

Developer information

Get source: git clone https://alioth.debian.org/anonscm/git/collab-maint/debci.git
Browse source
{file:HACKING.md How to setup a development environment}
{file:RUBYAPI.md The Ruby API to the debci data store}

Contact

For maintainer queries and general discussion:

mailing list: debian-qa@lists.debian.org
IRC: #debian-qa on OFTC. Feel free to highlight terceiro

For the development of debci itself

mailing list: autopkgtest-devel
IRC: #debci on OFTC

Copyright and Licensing information

debci is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later.

nerith/debci_ui