Release notes for radicle-ci-broker
This file summarizes the user-visible changes to radicle-ci-broker
between releases.
Version 0.27.0, released 2026-03-24
- Defelo updated crate dependencies to bring in a fix for a (so far undisclosed) security issue in Radicle 1.7.0.
Version 0.26.0, released 2026-03-06
-
Defelo added support for the
LocalRefsAnnouncedevents. This means you can CI on your local machine and its Radicle node. If you push a change to your node, CI runs. This means it’s not necessary to set up a separate CI node. A separate CI node is and will always be supported, though. -
The CI broker now depends on crates for Radicle 1.17, which is about to be released.
-
The installation documentation on a Debian system have been updated to refer to the Radicle APT repository, with release versions. Thank you to Yorgos for finding the problem.
Version 0.25.0, released 2026-01-20
-
Node events that are not handled are now logged. Previously they were ignored silently.
-
The
radicle-ci-brokercrate exposes fewer types from its dependencies. This makes it easier to use the crate as a library. -
The CI broker now depends on the current versions of the Radicle crates and other dependencies.
Version 0.24.0, released 2025-12-09
-
The way
ciblooks up job COBs for specific commits has been optimized to use a cache. This speeds things up a lot in some circumstances: in one benchmark, creating 100 new runs for a commit went down from 600 seconds to 40. -
The log messages for a CI run, at the INFO level, are now easier to follow without being familiar with the code base. Especially the decision on whether an event filter should trigger CI to run is logged as one message and contains the whole decision tree as JSON.
-
When it loads the configuration file,
cibnow checks that a default adapter is set, if thefiltersfield is used. Previously a missing default adapter was only noticed later when starting a CI run. The new behavior exposes problems much earlier.
Version 0.23.0, released 2025-11-25
-
There is now a “terminate this CI run” event. It will make
cibterminate a currently executing CI run. The event can be added to the event queue withcibtool --db ci.db event terminate c12c6749-b708-4a2e-8ec1-c10f1e9817e4, where the last argument is the broker run ID (not the adapter run ID). -
If the event queue has a “shut down” event, it it picked first. This avoids having to wait for the queue to be processed until the shut down event is next. The shut down event will prevent any new CI runs from being started.
-
There is now a document on how to implement an adapter (
doc/adapter-impl.md), rendered online at https://radicle-ci.liw.fi/radicle-ci-broker/adapter-impl.html. -
A small bug fix to the log messages for filtering tag events: the now say they are for tag events instead of branch events. The perils of having copy pasta for lunch. Found by Yorgos Saslis.
Version 0.22.0, released 2025-11-12
-
New event filter
AnyDelegateis true if the change originates at any delegate node. -
There is an overview document of Radicle CI in
doc/overview.md. -
A new configuration option
descriptionhas been added to thecibconfiguration file. Its value is a snippet of HTML inserted at the top of the front page of the HTML report produced by the CI broker. -
The
cibtool triggercommand now has a--messageoption to get a trigger message instead of a trigger event. The message is what is given to the adapter as input via its stdin. The new option is useful for creating tests data for testing adapters.
Version 0.21.0, released 2025-09-24
This entry was modified after the release, because the release process is excessively manual and prone to mistakes.
-
The event filters
TagCreated,TagUpdated, andTagDeletedwere added. They were supposed to have been added previously, and it was a bug they weren’t. -
The minimum supported Rust version (
rust-versionin inCargo.toml) is now 1.85. This is unrelated to the event filter change and fixes a bug in the previous release.
Version 0.20.1, released 2025-09-19
- This release has no user-visible changed, but depends on newer
versions of its Radicle dependencies, the
radicle,radicle-job, andradicle-git-extcrates.
Version 0.20.0, released 2025-09-09
Bug fixes
-
The configuration setting
max_run_timehas been fixed and now works, even if the adapter process produces less than two lines to its stdout. Previously,cibwould wait for the adapter to either close its stdout, or to output at least two lines. HTML report pages now mention if a CI run is terminated due to taking too long. -
The pattern in events that match on tags now match the entire name of the tag, not just any substring.
-
If a job COB for a specific commit already exists, it is updated, instead of creating a new COB for each CI run.
Other changes
-
The
cibtool triggercommand now has the option--allto trigger CI to run on all repositories known to the local node. -
The
cibtool triggercommand can now trigger CI to run on a patch with the--patchoption. -
The
cibtool logcommand can now readcibstderr log output directly, as is. The--journaloption is changed to--format, which takes one ofjournaldorcibas a value. This is technically a breaking change for those who use the command in scripts. -
The
cibtool logcommand now has a--jsonloption to format output as JSON Lines, which means one JSON object per line, and one line per JSON object. -
The
cibtool run addcommand now has a--job IDoption to record the ID of the job COB for a run. -
The HTML report pages now mention the job COB ID for a run, if it is known.
-
The configuration file fields
adaptersandfiltersare now optional. Not having the fields will make the CI broker instance somewhat useless, but it can be handy for testing other aspects of the software. -
The configuration field
status_update_interval_secondsis now deprecated. The field has never actually been implemented. Instead of a fixed interval, the HTML report pages andstatus.jsonare updated whenever anything changes in CI runs: a run is started or ends. -
Problems managing job COBs are logged, but otherwise ignored. It’s unfortunate if a job COB update fails, but it’s not worth failing the run for, or to start a re-run.
-
Packaging as a Debian
debpackage has been tidied up. As part of that, thecibandcibtoolcommand now have manual pages.
Version 0.19.1, released 2025-07-28
The main motivation for this release is to make changes to the
radicle_ci_broker::msg::helper::AdminLog type available to other
crates.
-
A couple of typos have been fixed in documentation and command line help text.
-
Dependencies on
radicleandradicle-jobcrates have been updated to current. This should not be user visible, except possibly due to bugs being fixed.
Version 0.19.0, released 2025-07-15
-
The CI broker now creates “job COBs” when it runs CI. These are Radicle collaborative objects that record results of automated processing of repositories. The CI broker uses them to record that CI has started running on a commit, and what the result is.
This is not yet useful without special tooling, but is a necessary step to enable automatically notifying users on other nodes of what is happening. It will become useful once Radicle user interfaces (
rad patch list,radicle-desktop, and more) learn to show the status of automated processing, based on the job COBs. The job COB implementation in theradicle-jobcrate was made by Fintan Halpenny. -
The
cibconfiguration file now allows configuring adapters, to simplify overall configuration by reducing the number of files involved. In thecibconfiguration file, an adapter specification can now include configuration for the adapter, using theconfigandconfig_envfields. This meanscibwill write the value of theconfigbfield to a temporary file and set the environment variable named in theconfig_envfield to the path to the temporary file. -
RSS feeds are now more correct, thanks to a patch and bug report from Sean Borg. He changed the feed item GUID field to no longer be marked as a permalink. He pointed out why feed items are sorted in the wrong way.
-
Some documentation fixes by Tshepang Mbambo and Richard Levitte..
-
A link to the new Radicle CI container adapter by Richard Levitte, who also made the new adapter.
Version 0.18.0, released 2025-06-04
-
The
cibprogram (the CI broker service process) now refuses to start if its configuration uses in thetriggersfield an adapter that hasn’t been defined in theadatptersfield. Such a configuration would not do what the node operator expects it to do. -
All lines read from the adapter child process standard output are now logged. This helps node operators troubleshoot problems.
-
In the
radicle_ci_broker::msg::helpermodule for implementing adapters in Rust, the exit code of every command run is now logged explicitly, not just when it’s non-zero. This makes it easier for node operators to debug problems by removing one small source of uncertainty about the result of running a command. If the exit code isn’t there, maybe the command never exited? -
The logging of thread management and life cycle for processing CI events and running adapters has been slightly improved. An error from a thread is logged.
Version 0.17.1, released 2025-05-19
- This is a “brown paper bag” release. I’d not added a test that
verifies that the new
concurrent_adaptersfield can be used in the configuration file. It is a truism that if it’s not tested, it doesn’t work, and thus it doesn’t work. This has been fixed now.
Version 0.17.0, released 2025-05-19
-
The CI broker can now run adapters concurrently. The maximum number of concurrent adapters can be set in the configuration file (
concurrent_adapters), and defaults to one. A limitation is that only one CI run is executed at the same time per repository. -
Fixes to the documentation from Tshepang Mbambo and Arnaud Bailly.
-
Minor update to the architecture document to simplify things.
-
The user guide now has a section on installing Radicle CI with Ambient on Debian.
Version 0.16.0, released 2025-04-17
-
The version number now contains the Git commit short id, to reduce ambiguity for versions built from between-releases states of the source code repository.
-
The user guide has gained a “Getting started” section.
-
The README no longer claims the CI broker unsuitable for production use.
-
There are now events for annotated Git tags, and corresponding filters that match a regular expression on the tag name. The events and filters are documented in the user guide.
-
The
cibtool run removecommand now only takes broker run IDs. This allows removing a run whose info has an encoding error.
Version 0.15.1, released 2025-03-26
- This release has no user-visible changes. It makes a change to the “message helper” module that is meant for Radicle CI adapters to use. The purpose of this release is to allow those adapters to depend on this release to get the helper functionality.
Version 0.15.0, released 2025-03-25
-
Fix a fatal problem when the CI broker is run with the report directory not existing (
report_dirsetting in the configuration file). Now, if the directory doesn’t exist, the reports are not generated, butcibwon’t misbehave. There will be a log message at the warning level: “HTML report directory does not exist”. If the directory is created later, whilecibis running, reports will be written there. -
Related to the above, there are some improvements to log messages related to this. The log messages for worker threads starting and ending are now at info level, except if threads end in failure, at error level.
Version 0.14.0, released 2025-03-24
Bug fixes:
-
The Ci broker had a programming error where it would consider it a fatal error if a CI event referred to a Git ref that was not a patch or a branch. This would cause the CI broker to terminate, resulting in no CI running, and the CI broker process having to be re-started. This has been changed so that such Git refs are merely ignored. An example of such a Git ref is an update to
sigrefs, which is fundamental to how Radicle works. -
When an event is picked from the event queue, it is removed at once. This means if something goes wrong while processing the event (running CI based on the event), the CI broker won’t re-try the event. This avoids a situation where something in the event causes processing to always end due to an error, resulting in the CI broker re-trying the same event over and over, forever. With the new behavior, the event is tried only once, and if it fails, it’s up to humans to figure out what caused this and to make it not happen again.
-
Many problems in how Git references are handled have been fixed. Radicle deals with at least three types of Git references: branch names (
main), qualified refs (refs/heads/main) and name spaced refs (refs/namespaces/$NID/refs/main). The CI broker is now more careful about keeping the different kinds apart. This results in theDefaultBranchfilter to work more reliably, when previously in some cases it would not, because the plain branch name was compared to a name spaced ref.
Other changes:
-
Logging is now more systematic and consistent. For example, all log messages are now structured, rather than just free form text. All log messages now have a
kindfield. All CI broker worker threads now emit a log message when they start and end, and if they end due to an error, the error is included in the log message. -
The new
cibtool event filter --explainexplains why a filter allows or denies an event. -
The RSS feeds produced by the CI broker now only contain up to ten entries. Apparently some RSS feed readers only remember a limited number of entries, and if the feed grows too long, they start treating really old entries as new. This can be alarming to the anxious developer who gets notified of failures in CI, only to later realize that it happened six months ago.
The number ten is currently fixed. If need be, it can be made configurable.
-
The user guide now has a chapter on configuring the CI broker.
Version 0.13.1, released 2025-03-05
-
The
NoneOf,AnyOf, andAllOfaliases for CI event filtersNot,Or, andAnd, respectively, have been added to the user guide. -
The CI broker now puts some metadata about CI runs to RSS feed entries, and has a feed for CI runs that have been triggered, or are running, but haven’t finished.
-
cibtool run removecan now remove information about CI runs from the database. -
cibtool triggercan output the event to trigger a CI run to the standard output, or a named file, instead of adding it the event queue in the database. This can be helpful to see what the event looks like, to troubleshoot weird problems. -
The
radicle_ci_broker::msg::helpermodule now has an admin log, and theruncmdandget_sourcesfunction log what they do to the admin log.
Version 0.13.0, released 2025-02-18
Bug fixes:
- CI event filter (de)serialization had problems that are now fixed.
A
Notexpression could not always be parsed correctly. See below for a related breaking change.
Breaking changes:
- The CI event filter operator
Notnow takes a list of event filters, and allows an event, if none of the events in the list allow. This is a breaking change, because previously the operand ofNotwas a filter. The new way:
- !Not
- !Allow
Previously this would have been: !Not Allow. That syntax no longer
works.
- The CI broker configuration file must now only have known fields. A
file with unknown fields is now rejected, which means the CI broker
won’t start. The purpose of this change is to ensure mis-spellings
in configuration file fields are caught. Previously, if the field
report_diras spelled asreportdidr, it would have been silently ignored. Now it is a loud error.
New features:
-
New CI event filter
!DefaultBranchthat checks if the event refers to the default branch of a Radicle repository. -
New CI event filter
!HasFilethat checks if the repository contains a specific file, in the commit that the event refers to. -
New aliases
!AllOf,!AnyOf, and!NoneOffor CI filters!And,!Or, and!Not. For each filter, both aliases work in the identical way. The purpose of the aliases is to be easier to understand. -
The CI broker crate
radicle-ci-brokerhas new helper functions in themsg::helpermodule:get_sourceto check out sources from the local node, andruncmdto run a command and capture its output. -
The
envfield for an adapter specification is now optional. -
The
cibtool triggercommand now defaults the ref tomainand the commit toHEAD, which simplifies use for a common case.
Version 0.12.0, released 2025-01-29
Breaking changes:
-
The
radicle_ci_broker::msg::helpermodule error type has been renames toMessageHelperErrorfromNativeMessageError. The old name was misleading and copy-pasted from the Radicle native CI adapter. -
The
radicle_ci_broker::db::Db::queued_eventsmethod has been dropped. This also means the CI broker no longer checks that the old “broker events” queue is empty when starting. Previouslycibwould refuse to start if the old queue wasn’t empty. (The new queue has “CI events”, which are different from “broker events”. This change only affects the old queue, which hasn’t been used in several releases.)
New features:
-
There is now a new way to specify when a CI run should trigger, using the new
triggersfield in the configuration file. The new approach allows many runs to be triggered from one change, and each run can have a different CI adapter. See the user guide chapter “Triggering CI” for details. The oldfilteranddefault_adapterapproach is still supported, but will eventually go away. -
As part of the
triggerschange, because of old mistakes, filtering of event now happens when queued events are processed. Previously, the filter was applied before an event was queued. This will hopefully not cause problems due to the event queue exploding in size. If it does cause problems, we can fix that, although it’ll require a database schema change. Let us know. -
The
cibtool triggeroption--ref(also known as--name) now defaults tomainand--commitdefaults toHEAD. This makes the command a little bit more convenient to use. -
The frequency of how often the event queue length is logged can now be configured. This reduces log spam when the CI broker is idle. The setting is called
queue_len_intervaland is set to one hour by default. -
The source code repository for the CI broker now includes packaging for the NixOS operating system.
Version 0.11.1, released 2025-01-09
This is primarily a bug fix release.
-
The CI adapter wasn’t capturing all standard error output from the adapter, if the adapter wrote an invalid message to its standard output. This has now been fixed.
-
The
radicle_ci_broker::msg::helpermodule has been added. It has some helpful functions for building CI adapters in Rust.
Version 0.11.0, released 2025-01-07
-
The CI broker no longer crashes if it fails to create a trigger message from a CI event. Previously, if there was some problem, such as a repository getting deleted between the CI event being added to the event queue and it getting picked up for processing, the CI broker would crash. The idea was that if the trigger message can’t be created, the event can’t be processed in a useful manner, and so it’s better to give up. What really happened is that systemd or another system would re-start the CI broker, which would pick up the same event, and again fail to create trigger message, resulting in another crash.
Now the CI broker will log the failure, delete the problematic event from the event queue, and then continue with the next event. This makes the CI broker more robust.
-
Some log messages have “extra data” in separate fields, instead of the free-form message field. The separate fields are typically text with values in the Rust debug format, so they’re still not very easily consumed by other programs, but they’re at least easier to see.
-
Log messages related to a specific CI run now include the broker run ID as an extra field. This makes it easier to extract all the messages related to a specific CI run.
-
Most log messages now have an extra
msg_idfield that contains the type of message, such asAdapterConfig,BrokerRunStart, orCibEndSuccess. The full list is in thesrc/logger.rssource file. -
The
cibtool logsubcommand can extractciblog messages from the systemd journal:
sudo journalctl -S today -u radicle-ci-broker -o json | cibtool log --log-level info
The output of cibtool log is JSON, which is reasonably easy to
post-process by another program, such as jq or a small Python
script.
Version 0.10.0, released 2024-12-05
Bug fix:
-
The CI broker now depends on version 0.14.0 of the
radiclecrate, to fix Git object identifier serialization and deserialization. You may need to remove any queued, but unprocessed CI events, using the commandcibtool --db foo.db event remove --all. If yourcibkeeps crashing due to an error related toOid, you need to do this. -
The CI broker now correctly sets the origin for a change. Previously it set it to node from which the change fetched. In a distributed system this may be a different node than the origin.
-
The branch name in trigger messages in HTML reports has been fixed. It used to say “push-event-has-no-branch-name”.
Other changes:
-
Many log messages are now at a lower the “debug” log level to make it easier to remove log spam.
-
Most log messages now have a
kindfield to allow better identification of what kind of message it is, without having to rely on parsing the free-form message text. -
Many log messages now have details in extra fields in the log message, rather than embed them in the free-form message text.
-
The
cibcommand now has help text for its options and subcommands, shown with the--helpoption andhelpsubcommand.
Version 0.9.0, released 2024-11-21
This release is mostly about small improvements.
- The log messages from the module that runs the adapter have been
demoted from
debuglevel totrace, so that they’re easier to filter away. - The per-adapter configuration setting
sensitive_envsis now optional. - The CI broker now generates two RSS feeds: one for all CI runs, and one for failures. This is a stop gap measure until we in Radicle decide how to distribute this information in a more reliable way.
- The CI broker HTML report pages have become a little nicer:
- The per-repository pages have a link to the front page.
- The event queue on the front page shows the alias for each repository, in addition to the repository id.
- The front page shows counts of CI runs per-repository, and for all repositories together. There’s a count of total runs, failed runs, and count of recent failures.
- Some improvements for the CI broker architecture documentation, currently published at https://pages.radicle.liw.fi/ci-broker/.
Version 0.8.0, released 2024-11-08
This release has a major new feature (max_run_time, see first entry
below), which is also a bug fix, and was tricky to implement. That
meant it took a while and that delayed this release by weeks. There’s
a bunch of smaller changes too.
-
The way the CI broker runs a CI adapter has been rewritten to allow the node operator to set a time limit on a CI run, and to fix a bug where the CI broker would get stuck if the adapter produced too much output.
To set the maximum duration of a CI run, add the
max_run_timefield to the configuration file. The default is one hour.Example:
max_run_time: 10hThe https://docs.rs/duration-str/latest/duration_str/ page describes the unit suffixes that are supported.
-
The event filters can now use the
Nodepredicate to require changes to originate in a specific node. -
The
cibtool event removesub-command has an option--allto remove all queued events. This may be useful in the future for breaking upgrades, or when the node operator is having a bad day. -
The
cibprogram does not start unless it has a local node. -
There is a start of a user guide, which is published automatically at https://pages.radicle.liw.fi/ci-broker/userguide.html for now. The location is likely to change in the future.
-
The front report page now says if the CI run succeeded or failed, if the run has finished. Previously it only said the run had finished.
-
The report pages are now updated whenever the state of a CI run changes. This makes it easier to follow the run via a web browser. Previously the pages were generated on a schedule.
Version 0.7.0, released 2024-10-14
This release breaks many existing instances. The event filter configuration needs to be reviewed upon upgrade, and the event queue in the database needs to be emptied before running the new version.
Breaking changes
-
Internally, the CI broker now converts change events from the Radicle node into “CI events”. In previous versions of the CI broker it used “broker events”. CI events are different from broker events, and aim to be more suitable for CI purposes. This also affects the event filter in the CI broker configuration. See the new user guide for details on the CI events.
Note that in some simple cases, the old broker events match a new CI event exactly, for filtering. As an example, a filter on a specific branch is the same.
The CI event changes only affect the configuration file and the database. The CI adapters and the messages communicating with them are not affected. Existing adapters work as before.
Bug fixes
-
The CI broker no longer logs the sensitive environment variables in clear text. Fix by Michalis.
-
The CI broker no longer appends a “shut down” event to the event queue when it loses connection to the local Radicle node. This was a remnant of an old development phase, used to tell other threads in the CI broker to terminate. There is now a better way to do that and the spurious event is not needed. In fact, the spurious event would be processed by the CI broker after it got re-started, meaning the new process would immediately terminate. Ars long, vita brevis.
-
The log message of the CI broker process ending with an unrecoverable error is not logged at the error level instead of the info level.
Other changes
-
A start of a CI broker user guide (aimed at node operators) has been added to the source repository. It will be published by the CI broker’s CI on https://pages.radicle.liw.fi/ci-broker/.
-
The CI broker now enables logging in trace and debug levels in release builds.
-
CI broker logging level can be set with new
--log-levelcommand line option. This functionality was dropped when structured logging was added. Note that the old way of controlling logging level with an environment variable is still absent. Please open an issue if you want it back. -
The CI broker now logs a lot more detail. Possibly too much detail.
-
The
cibtool event add --baseoptions value is not rev-parsed. This means a value likeHEADorHEAD^will work. Previously it had to be a commit SHA.
Version 0.6.3, released 2024-09-16
A very small release that I make mostly to keep up a weekly release cadence.
-
Fix bug where CI broker would crash (panic) when generating HTML report pages. The cause was that it was assuming that each CI run had a run ID assigned by the CI adapter, and that they were unique. This was a faulty assumption. Luckily, all this code making the assumption had been made superfluous by earlier changes, so it could just be removed. This resulted in further simplification of the report generation code, but those should not be visible to users.
-
Add the
cibtool event recordsubcommand, to listen on node events and optionally write them to a file. As this uses the same code ascibto subscribe to node events, it’s a way for node operators to verify that the CI broker can actually receive events. -
Add the
cibtool event brokersubcommand that reads a previously recorded (or constructed) file with node events and produces the corresponding broker events from them. This can be useful to create test files for verifying that event filters work as intended, for node operators. -
Add the
cibtool event filtersubcommand that reads a set of event filter expressions from one file, and broker events from another file, and writes out the events allowed by the filter. This is meant to be useful for node operators to verify that their event filters work as meant.
Version 0.6.2, released 2024-09-10
A very small release that I make mostly to keep up a weekly release cadence.
-
README.mdnow documents dependencies that aren’t Rust crates needed to run the test suite. -
A small bug fix to the acceptance test suite. The dummy adapter used in the suite did not read its stdin, so the adapter would sometimes finish before the CI adapter wrote the trigger message to the adapter’s stdin, which failed, causing the whole test to fail.
Version 0.6.1, released 2024-09-02
- This updates the dependencies on other Radicle crates, to make it
easier to
cargo installthe CI broker.
Version 0.6.0, released 2024-09-02
Breaking changes
- The CI broker test suite now verifies that it can be upgraded without making changes to the configuration file or the database. This should lessen how often accidental, unintended breaking changes, so this counts as a user-visible lack of change. Note that this testing doesn’t prevent breaking changes from being made, but makes it more likely that they’ll be documented as such.
New or changed features
- The CI broker now logs, to its own log, the standard error output of the CI adapter it runs, as well as their exist code. This should make it easier to debug problems in adapters, especially for the developers of the adapters. The log messages look like:
{"msg":"adapter exit code","level":"DEBG","ts":"2024-08-27T17:38:26.762222386Z","exit_code":1}
{"msg":"adapter stderr","level":"DEBG","ts":"2024-08-27T17:38:26.762289242Z","stderr":"woe be me\n"}
-
The
cibtool event listcommand now has a--jdonoption to output the event queue using the JSON format, for easier post-processing by other software. -
The CI broker logs its git commit when it starts.
-
The CI broker
README.mdlists the known CI adapter, and links to documentation about using them.
Version 0.5.0, released 2024-08-26
Breaking changes
-
All CI broker (
cib) logging is now to the standard error output as JSON Lines: each log message is on its own line as one JSON object. This is a breaking change as it changes what is logged and how, and this may matter to those consuming the log output.The
RADICLE_CI_LOGenvironment variable no longer affects CI broker logging. -
The
cibtool run addoption--aliashas been removed. It was mis-named (repositories have names, not aliases), and also unnecessary, as the program can look up the repository name itself. Related to this, the JSON output calls itrepo_nameinstead ofrepo_alias. However, when reading run information stored in the database, the old name is still accepted.
New or changed features
-
The
cibtool run addoption--repocan now take a repository name, instead of its id, if there is exactly one repository with that name in the local node. -
The HTML report front page now lists the current queue of unprocessed events, except for events for private repositories. The JSON status page includes the length of the queue.
Version 0.4.0, released 2024-08-19
This is the fourth release. In breaking with tradition, it does not have significant breaking changes.
Breaking changes
-
The
cibtool run listcommand now lists only the identifiers of CI runs, one per line, by default. An option--jsonwas added to get all the information in a format that’s easy to parse with a program. This is a breaking change if you parse the output of the command with another command. -
The
cibtool run addcommand no longer has a--finishedoption. It is now enough to use--successfulor--failure. The dropped option was always used with one of those two, and those two were always used with the dropped option, so the dropped one was pointless and provided no extra information. It was just extra work for the user.
Bug fixes
-
The CI broker handles errors without panicking now. Instead of a stack trace, an actual error message is shown. This may be more friendly to most people.
-
The CI broker now depends on Radicle 0.12.0, to say more current with changes in Radicle.
-
The
cibtool run addcommand sets the state correctly if the run has finished. Previously it was set to “triggered”. -
Several instances of “CI” being spelled as “Ci” have been fixed, in log messages and help texts.
New or changed features
-
The HTML report pages produced by the CI broker are now a little more readable.
-
The various parts of the running CI broker now notify each other that there have been changes so that the other parts can do what they need to do at once, instead of checking on a fixed schedule. This means, for example, that the HTML report pages for a run are updated at once, instead of once a minute.
-
The
cibandcibtoolcommands now both have an option--versionto show the version number of the program. -
The
cibtool triggercommand makes it easier to trigger a CI run. This duplicates the functionality ofcibtool event add, but is a little simpler to remember, and a little safer to use. The trigger command makes sure the base commit is always set in the event it creates. (The command to add an event does not, in cases users really want that behavior.) -
Each CI run now has two identifiers: one invented by the CI broker itself, guaranteed to be unique, and one chosen by the adapter, meant to reflect the identifier used by an external CI system, and guaranteed to be unique. Everywhere the user refers to a CI run, either ID is accepted, as long as the adapter one is unambiguous. When a run ID is shown, both kinds are shown.
-
During a CI run, when anything happens, the information about the run is updated in the database at once, instead of at the end of the run. This means the change is not lost in case the CI broker is terminated before the run finishes.
-
New commands
cibtool run showandcibtool run updateto show information about a run, and update it. The updating is probably mostly only relevant to those writing test suites for the CI broker. -
Started documenting the acceptance criteria for logging in the CI broker, and how to verify that the criteria are met. This will probably continue over the next few releases. As part of this, the stakeholders are documented. In this release the list of stakeholders is quite rudimentary and the CI broker developers would like to hear from you if you have any wants or needs about the CI broker, whether about logging or otherwise.
Additionally, this takes the first small steps towards having structured logging.
Version 0.3.0, released 2024-07-18
This is the third release. It breaks all existing installations.
Bug fixes
-
The CI broker now parses Git ref names for node identifiers more correctly.
-
When the node sends an event about a branch having changed, the CI broker now allows the branch name to have slashes.
New or changed features
-
The
ci-brokerprogram has been replaced with thecibprogram, which is better in a few ways. Most importantly, it persists the node events that need to be processed, in a queue, so that they are not lost when the CI broker is re-started. The persistent storage is in the form of an SQLite database file:ci-brokerused it already, butcibputs more information in it. There is also a list of all CI runscibhas performed. -
The
cibtoolprogram has been added to allow the node operator to managecib, via the SQLite database file.cibtoollets the operator to view and manipulate the node event queue, and the list of CI runs, and to generate HTML report pages from information in the database. (cibgenerates the same report pages when running:cibtoolfunctionality is there just in case.) -
CI broker logging continues to be inconsistent and helpful mainly to those developing the CI broker itself. Some logging has been removed, to avoid so called logspam.
-
The code has been refactored a lot, for simplicity. This should be invisible to others, especially the adapter implementations, but just in case, be aware something externally visible may have changed inadvertently.
-
The
BrokerEvent::is_allowedmethod is no longer exposed in the CI broker public API. If you need it, let us know. -
The CI broker now logs the executable filename of the adapter it runs.
-
The acceptance criteria for the CI broker are now documented in more detail in the subplot (see
ci-broker.mdand the Subplot software). The subplot document is available as HTML. -
Various undocumented helper programs have been dropped from the CI broker. Their functionality, if needed, can be added to
cibtoolin the future.
Version 0.2.0, released 2024-06-06
This is the second release.
Bug fixes
-
The CI broker now picks the newest commit in a patch or branch, rather than the oldest. This means changes to a patch or branch get processed by CI, rather than only the first version. (Lars Wirzenius)
-
Error messages are a little clearer now. An unclear error message is a bug. (Lars Wirzenius)
-
Problems with the adapter sub-process failing are handled better now. (Lars Wirzenius)
-
If the CI broker loses its connection to the Radicle node, the broker now terminates. Previously, it would keep trying to receive a message from the broken connection, which it would never receive, since the connection was broken in a way that it would not be mended even if the node is restarted. Computers are very patient, and never give up hope, so the CI broker was willing to wait until the heat death of the universe, or a power outage, whichever came first.
Now, something like
systemdcan be used to restart the CI broker if this happens, and the system will recover. (Lars Wirzenius)
New or changed features
-
The CI broker depend on the version of the
radiclecrate that corresponds to the Radicle (heartwood) version 1.0.0 release candidate 10. This makes it possible to use the CI broker with the current version of Radicle. (Lars Wirzenius) -
The adapter protocol now allows an adapter to give the CI broker a URL related to the CI run. This can be used to link to a build log, for example. (Lars Wirzenius)
-
The node event filter now has an
AnyPushRefcondition. (Michalis Zampetakis) -
The CI broker architecture documentation is now published to https://pages.radicle.liw.fi/ci-broker/architecture.html by CI whenever the CI broker is changed. (Lars Wirzenius)
-
The logging for event handling a lot more verbose. This is useful for debugging problems, but is otherwise so noisy logs become nearly useless. (Lars Wirzenius)
-
The documentation for the broker/adapter protocol should be up to date. (Michalis Zampetakis)
-
The CI broker configuration now has the
sensitive_envsfield to allow specifying environment variables that should not be logged. (Lars Wirzenius) -
The CI broker can now be shut down cleanly. This is mostly useful for testing, though, at least for now, but opens up the possibility of shutting down only after any in-progress CI runs having finished first. (Lars Wirzenius)
Version 0.1.0, released 2024-04-03
This was the first release. No notes.
# Release notes for `radicle-ci-broker`
This file summarizes the user-visible changes to `radicle-ci-broker`
between releases.
## Version 0.27.0, released 2026-03-24
* Defelo updated crate dependencies to bring in a fix for a (so far undisclosed)
security issue in Radicle 1.7.0.
## Version 0.26.0, released 2026-03-06
* Defelo added support for the `LocalRefsAnnounced` events. This means you can
CI on your local machine and its Radicle node. If you push a change to your
node, CI runs. This means it's not necessary to set up a separate CI node.
A separate CI node is and will always be supported, though.
* The CI broker now depends on crates for Radicle 1.17, which is about to be
released.
* The installation documentation on a Debian system have been updated to refer
to the Radicle APT repository, with release versions. Thank you to Yorgos for
finding the problem.
## Version 0.25.0, released 2026-01-20
* Node events that are not handled are now logged. Previously they were
ignored silently.
* The `radicle-ci-broker` crate exposes fewer types from its dependencies.
This makes it easier to use the crate as a library.
* The CI broker now depends on the current versions of the Radicle crates and
other dependencies.
## Version 0.24.0, released 2025-12-09
* The way `cib` looks up job COBs for specific commits has been optimized to
use a cache. This speeds things up a lot in some circumstances: in one benchmark,
creating 100 new runs for a commit went down from 600 seconds to 40.
* The log messages for a CI run, at the INFO level, are now easier to follow
without being familiar with the code base. Especially the decision on
whether an event filter should trigger CI to run is logged as one message
and contains the whole decision tree as JSON.
* When it loads the configuration file, `cib` now checks that a default
adapter is set, if the `filters` field is used. Previously a missing default
adapter was only noticed later when starting a CI run. The new behavior
exposes problems much earlier.
## Version 0.23.0, released 2025-11-25
* There is now a "terminate this CI run" event. It will make `cib` terminate a
currently executing CI run. The event can be added to the event queue with
`cibtool --db ci.db event terminate c12c6749-b708-4a2e-8ec1-c10f1e9817e4`, where
the last argument is the broker run ID (not the adapter run ID).
* If the event queue has a "shut down" event, it it picked first. This avoids
having to wait for the queue to be processed until the shut down event is
next. The shut down event will prevent any new CI runs from being started.
* There is now a document on how to implement an
adapter (`doc/adapter-impl.md`), rendered online at
<https://radicle-ci.liw.fi/radicle-ci-broker/adapter-impl.html>.
* A small bug fix to the log messages for filtering tag events: the now say
they are for tag events instead of branch events. The perils of having copy
pasta for lunch. Found by Yorgos Saslis.
## Version 0.22.0, released 2025-11-12
* New event filter `AnyDelegate` is true if the change originates
at any delegate node.
* There is an overview document of Radicle CI in `doc/overview.md`.
* A new configuration option `description` has been added to the
`cib` configuration file. Its value is a snippet of HTML inserted
at the top of the front page of the HTML report produced by the
CI broker.
* The `cibtool trigger` command now has a `--message` option to get
a trigger message instead of a trigger event. The message is what
is given to the adapter as input via its stdin. The new option is
useful for creating tests data for testing adapters.
## Version 0.21.0, released 2025-09-24
This entry was modified after the release, because the release process
is excessively manual and prone to mistakes.
* The event filters `TagCreated`, `TagUpdated`, and `TagDeleted` were
added. They were supposed to have been added previously, and it was
a bug they weren't.
* The minimum supported Rust version (`rust-version` in in `Cargo.toml`)
is now 1.85. This is unrelated to the event filter change and fixes a
bug in the previous release.
## Version 0.20.1, released 2025-09-19
* This release has no user-visible changed, but depends on newer
versions of its Radicle dependencies, the `radicle`, `radicle-job`,
and `radicle-git-ext` crates.
## Version 0.20.0, released 2025-09-09
### Bug fixes
* The configuration setting `max_run_time` has been fixed and now
works, even if the adapter process produces less than two lines to
its stdout. Previously, `cib` would wait for the adapter to either
close its stdout, or to output at least two lines. HTML report pages
now mention if a CI run is terminated due to taking too long.
* The pattern in events that match on tags now match the entire name
of the tag, not just any substring.
* If a job COB for a specific commit already exists, it is updated,
instead of creating a new COB for each CI run.
### Other changes
* The `cibtool trigger` command now has the option `--all` to trigger
CI to run on all repositories known to the local node.
* The `cibtool trigger` command can now trigger CI to run on a patch
with the `--patch` option.
* The `cibtool log` command can now read `cib` stderr log output
directly, as is. The `--journal` option is changed to `--format`,
which takes one of `journald` or `cib` as a value. This is
technically a breaking change for those who use the command in
scripts.
* The `cibtool log` command now has a `--jsonl` option to format
output as JSON Lines, which means one JSON object per line, and one
line per JSON object.
* The `cibtool run add` command now has a `--job ID` option to record
the ID of the job COB for a run.
* The HTML report pages now mention the job COB ID for a run, if it is
known.
* The configuration file fields `adapters` and `filters` are now
optional. Not having the fields will make the CI broker instance
somewhat useless, but it can be handy for testing other aspects of
the software.
* The configuration field `status_update_interval_seconds` is now
deprecated. The field has never actually been implemented. Instead
of a fixed interval, the HTML report pages and `status.json` are
updated whenever anything changes in CI runs: a run is started or
ends.
* Problems managing job COBs are logged, but otherwise ignored. It's
unfortunate if a job COB update fails, but it's not worth failing
the run for, or to start a re-run.
* Packaging as a Debian `deb` package has been tidied up. As part of
that, the `cib` and `cibtool` command now have manual pages.
## Version 0.19.1, released 2025-07-28
The main motivation for this release is to make changes to the
`radicle_ci_broker::msg::helper::AdminLog` type available to other
crates.
* A couple of typos have been fixed in documentation and command line
help text.
* Dependencies on `radicle` and `radicle-job` crates have been updated
to current. This should not be user visible, except possibly due to
bugs being fixed.
## Version 0.19.0, released 2025-07-15
* The CI broker now creates "job COBs" when it runs CI. These are
Radicle collaborative objects that record results of automated
processing of repositories. The CI broker uses them to record that
CI has started running on a commit, and what the result is.
This is not yet useful without special tooling, but is a necessary
step to enable automatically notifying users on other nodes of what
is happening. It will become useful once Radicle user interfaces
(`rad patch list`, `radicle-desktop`, and more) learn to show the
status of automated processing, based on the job COBs. The job COB
implementation in the `radicle-job` crate was made by Fintan
Halpenny.
* The `cib` configuration file now allows configuring adapters, to
simplify overall configuration by reducing the number of files
involved. In the `cib` configuration file, an adapter specification
can now include configuration for the adapter, using the `config`
and `config_env` fields. This means `cib` will write the value of
the `configb` field to a temporary file and set the environment
variable named in the `config_env` field to the path to the
temporary file.
* RSS feeds are now more correct, thanks to a patch and bug report
from Sean Borg. He changed the feed item GUID field to no longer be
marked as a permalink. He pointed out why feed items are sorted in
the wrong way.
* Some documentation fixes by Tshepang Mbambo and Richard Levitte..
* A link to the new Radicle CI container adapter by Richard Levitte,
who also made the new adapter.
## Version 0.18.0, released 2025-06-04
* The `cib` program (the CI broker service process) now refuses to
start if its configuration uses in the `triggers` field an adapter
that hasn't been defined in the `adatpters` field. Such a
configuration would not do what the node operator expects it to do.
* All lines read from the adapter child process standard output are
now logged. This helps node operators troubleshoot problems.
* In the `radicle_ci_broker::msg::helper` module for implementing
adapters in Rust, the exit code of every command run is now logged
explicitly, not just when it's non-zero. This makes it easier for
node operators to debug problems by removing one small source of
uncertainty about the result of running a command. If the exit code
isn't there, maybe the command never exited?
* The logging of thread management and life cycle for processing CI
events and running adapters has been slightly improved. An error
from a thread is logged.
## Version 0.17.1, released 2025-05-19
* This is a "brown paper bag" release. I'd not added a test that
verifies that the new `concurrent_adapters` field can be used in the
configuration file. It is a truism that [if it's not tested, it
doesn't
work](https://yakking.branchable.com/posts/truism-4-if-it-is-not-tested/),
and thus it doesn't work. This has been fixed now.
## Version 0.17.0, released 2025-05-19
* The CI broker can now run adapters concurrently. The maximum number
of concurrent adapters can be set in the configuration file
(`concurrent_adapters`), and defaults to one. A limitation is that
only one CI run is executed at the same time per repository.
* Fixes to the documentation from Tshepang Mbambo and Arnaud Bailly.
* Minor update to the architecture document to simplify things.
* The user guide now has a section on installing Radicle CI with
Ambient on Debian.
## Version 0.16.0, released 2025-04-17
* The version number now contains the Git commit short id, to reduce
ambiguity for versions built from between-releases states of the
source code repository.
* The user guide has gained a "Getting started" section.
* The README no longer claims the CI broker unsuitable for production
use.
* There are now events for annotated Git tags, and corresponding
filters that match a regular expression on the tag name. The events
and filters are documented in the user guide.
* The `cibtool run remove` command now only takes broker run IDs. This
allows removing a run whose info has an encoding error.
## Version 0.15.1, released 2025-03-26
* This release has no user-visible changes. It makes a change to the
"message helper" module that is meant for Radicle CI adapters to
use. The purpose of this release is to allow those adapters to
depend on this release to get the helper functionality.
## Version 0.15.0, released 2025-03-25
* Fix a fatal problem when the CI broker is run with the report
directory not existing (`report_dir` setting in the configuration
file). Now, if the directory doesn't exist, the reports are not
generated, but `cib` won't misbehave. There will be a log message at
the warning level: "HTML report directory does not exist". If the
directory is created later, while `cib` is running, reports will be
written there.
* Related to the above, there are some improvements to log messages
related to this. The log messages for worker threads starting and
ending are now at info level, except if threads end in failure, at
error level.
## Version 0.14.0, released 2025-03-24
Bug fixes:
* The Ci broker had a programming error where it would consider it a
fatal error if a CI event referred to a Git ref that was not a patch
or a branch. This would cause the CI broker to terminate, resulting
in no CI running, and the CI broker process having to be re-started.
This has been changed so that such Git refs are merely ignored. An
example of such a Git ref is an update to `sigrefs`, which is
fundamental to how Radicle works.
* When an event is picked from the event queue, it is removed at once.
This means if something goes wrong while processing the event
(running CI based on the event), the CI broker won't re-try the
event. This avoids a situation where something in the event causes
processing to always end due to an error, resulting in the CI broker
re-trying the same event over and over, forever. With the new
behavior, the event is tried only once, and if it fails, it's up to
humans to figure out what caused this and to make it not happen
again.
* Many problems in how Git references are handled have been fixed.
Radicle deals with at least three types of Git references: branch
names (`main`), qualified refs (`refs/heads/main`) and name spaced
refs (`refs/namespaces/$NID/refs/main`). The CI broker is now more
careful about keeping the different kinds apart. This results in the
`DefaultBranch` filter to work more reliably, when previously in
some cases it would not, because the plain branch name was compared
to a name spaced ref.
Other changes:
* Logging is now more systematic and consistent. For example, all log
messages are now structured, rather than just free form text. All
log messages now have a `kind` field. All CI broker worker threads
now emit a log message when they start and end, and if they end due
to an error, the error is included in the log message.
* The new `cibtool event filter --explain` explains why a filter
allows or denies an event.
* The RSS feeds produced by the CI broker now only contain up to ten
entries. Apparently some RSS feed readers only remember a limited
number of entries, and if the feed grows too long, they start
treating really old entries as new. This can be alarming to the
anxious developer who gets notified of failures in CI, only to later
realize that it happened six months ago.
The number ten is currently fixed. If need be, it can be made
configurable.
* The user guide now has a chapter on configuring the CI broker.
## Version 0.13.1, released 2025-03-05
* The `NoneOf`, `AnyOf`, and `AllOf` aliases for CI event filters
`Not`, `Or`, and `And`, respectively, have been added to the user
guide.
* The CI broker now puts some metadata about CI runs to RSS feed
entries, and has a feed for CI runs that have been triggered, or are
running, but haven't finished.
* `cibtool run remove` can now remove information about CI runs from
the database.
* `cibtool trigger` can output the event to trigger a CI run to the
standard output, or a named file, instead of adding it the event
queue in the database. This can be helpful to see what the event
looks like, to troubleshoot weird problems.
* The `radicle_ci_broker::msg::helper` module now has an admin log,
and the `runcmd` and `get_sources` function log what they do to the
admin log.
## Version 0.13.0, released 2025-02-18
Bug fixes:
* CI event filter (de)serialization had problems that are now fixed.
A `Not` expression could not always be parsed correctly. See below
for a related breaking change.
Breaking changes:
* The CI event filter operator `Not` now takes a list of event
filters, and allows an event, if none of the events in the list
allow. This is a breaking change, because previously the operand of
`Not` was a filter. The new way:
~~~yaml
- !Not
- !Allow
~~~
Previously this would have been: `!Not Allow`. That syntax no longer
works.
* The CI broker configuration file must now only have known fields. A
file with unknown fields is now rejected, which means the CI broker
won't start. The purpose of this change is to ensure mis-spellings
in configuration file fields are caught. Previously, if the field
`report_dir` as spelled as `reportdidr`, it would have been silently
ignored. Now it is a loud error.
New features:
* New CI event filter `!DefaultBranch` that checks if the event refers
to the default branch of a Radicle repository.
* New CI event filter `!HasFile` that checks if the repository
contains a specific file, in the commit that the event refers to.
* New aliases `!AllOf`, `!AnyOf`, and `!NoneOf` for CI filters `!And`,
`!Or`, and `!Not`. For each filter, both aliases work in the
identical way. The purpose of the aliases is to be easier to
understand.
* The CI broker crate `radicle-ci-broker` has new helper functions in
the `msg::helper` module: `get_source` to check out sources from the
local node, and `runcmd` to run a command and capture its output.
* The `env` field for an adapter specification is now optional.
* The `cibtool trigger` command now defaults the ref to `main` and the
commit to `HEAD`, which simplifies use for a common case.
## Version 0.12.0, released 2025-01-29
Breaking changes:
* The `radicle_ci_broker::msg::helper` module error type has been
renames to `MessageHelperError` from `NativeMessageError`. The old
name was misleading and copy-pasted from the Radicle native CI
adapter.
* The `radicle_ci_broker::db::Db::queued_events` method has been
dropped. This also means the CI broker no longer checks that the old
"broker events" queue is empty when starting. Previously `cib` would
refuse to start if the old queue wasn't empty. (The new queue has
"CI events", which are different from "broker events". This change
only affects the old queue, which hasn't been used in several
releases.)
New features:
* There is now a new way to specify when a CI run should trigger,
using the new `triggers` field in the configuration file. The new
approach allows many runs to be triggered from one change, and each
run can have a different CI adapter. See the user guide chapter
"Triggering CI" for details. The old `filter` and `default_adapter`
approach is still supported, but will eventually go away.
* As part of the `triggers` change, because of old mistakes, filtering
of event now happens when queued events are processed. Previously,
the filter was applied before an event was queued. This will
hopefully not cause problems due to the event queue exploding in
size. If it does cause problems, we can fix that, although it'll
require a database schema change. Let us know.
* The `cibtool trigger` option `--ref` (also known as `--name`) now
defaults to `main` and `--commit` defaults to `HEAD`. This makes the
command a little bit more convenient to use.
* The frequency of how often the event queue length is logged can now
be configured. This reduces log spam when the CI broker is idle. The
setting is called `queue_len_interval` and is set to one hour by
default.
* The source code repository for the CI broker now includes packaging
for the NixOS operating system.
## Version 0.11.1, released 2025-01-09
This is primarily a bug fix release.
* The CI adapter wasn't capturing all standard error output from the
adapter, if the adapter wrote an invalid message to its standard
output. This has now been fixed.
* The `radicle_ci_broker::msg::helper` module has been added. It has
some helpful functions for building CI adapters in Rust.
## Version 0.11.0, released 2025-01-07
* The CI broker no longer crashes if it fails to create a trigger
message from a CI event. Previously, if there was some problem, such
as a repository getting deleted between the CI event being added to
the event queue and it getting picked up for processing, the CI
broker would crash. The idea was that if the trigger message can't
be created, the event can't be processed in a useful manner, and so
it's better to give up. What really happened is that systemd or
another system would re-start the CI broker, which would pick up the
same event, and again fail to create trigger message, resulting in
another crash.
Now the CI broker will log the failure, delete the problematic event
from the event queue, and then continue with the next event. This
makes the CI broker more robust.
* Some log messages have "extra data" in separate fields, instead of
the free-form message field. The separate fields are typically text
with values in the Rust debug format, so they're still not very
easily consumed by other programs, but they're at least easier to
see.
* Log messages related to a specific CI run now include the broker run
ID as an extra field. This makes it easier to extract all the
messages related to a specific CI run.
* Most log messages now have an extra `msg_id` field that contains the
type of message, such as `AdapterConfig`, `BrokerRunStart`, or
`CibEndSuccess`. The full list is in the `src/logger.rs` source
file.
* The `cibtool log` subcommand can extract `cib` log messages from the
systemd journal:
~~~
sudo journalctl -S today -u radicle-ci-broker -o json | cibtool log --log-level info
~~~
The output of `cibtool log` is JSON, which is reasonably easy to
post-process by another program, such as `jq` or a small Python
script.
## Version 0.10.0, released 2024-12-05
Bug fix:
* The CI broker now depends on version 0.14.0 of the `radicle` crate,
to fix Git object identifier serialization and deserialization. You
may need to remove any queued, but unprocessed CI events, using the
command `cibtool --db foo.db event remove --all`. If your `cib`
keeps crashing due to an error related to `Oid`, you need to do
this.
* The CI broker now correctly sets the origin for a change. Previously
it set it to node from which the change fetched. In a distributed
system this may be a different node than the origin.
* The branch name in trigger messages in HTML reports has been fixed.
It used to say "push-event-has-no-branch-name".
Other changes:
* Many log messages are now at a lower the "debug" log level to make
it easier to remove log spam.
* Most log messages now have a `kind` field to allow better
identification of what kind of message it is, without having to rely
on parsing the free-form message text.
* Many log messages now have details in extra fields in the log
message, rather than embed them in the free-form message text.
* The `cib` command now has help text for its options and subcommands,
shown with the `--help` option and `help` subcommand.
## Version 0.9.0, released 2024-11-21
This release is mostly about small improvements.
* The log messages from the module that runs the adapter have been
demoted from `debug` level to `trace`, so that they're easier to
filter away.
* The per-adapter configuration setting `sensitive_envs` is now
optional.
* The CI broker now generates two RSS feeds: one for all CI runs, and
one for failures. This is a stop gap measure until we in Radicle
decide how to distribute this information in a more reliable way.
* The CI broker HTML report pages have become a little nicer:
- The per-repository pages have a link to the front page.
- The event queue on the front page shows the alias for each
repository, in addition to the repository id.
- The front page shows counts of CI runs per-repository, and for all
repositories together. There's a count of total runs, failed runs,
and count of recent failures.
* Some improvements for the CI broker architecture documentation,
currently published at <https://pages.radicle.liw.fi/ci-broker/>.
## Version 0.8.0, released 2024-11-08
This release has a major new feature (`max_run_time`, see first entry
below), which is also a bug fix, and was tricky to implement. That
meant it took a while and that delayed this release by weeks. There's
a bunch of smaller changes too.
* The way the CI broker runs a CI adapter has been rewritten to allow
the node operator to set a time limit on a CI run, and to fix a bug
where the CI broker would get stuck if the adapter produced too much
output.
To set the maximum duration of a CI run, add the `max_run_time`
field to the configuration file. The default is one hour.
Example: `max_run_time: 10h`
The <https://docs.rs/duration-str/latest/duration_str/> page
describes the unit suffixes that are supported.
* The event filters can now use the `Node` predicate to require
changes to originate in a specific node.
* The `cibtool event remove` sub-command has an option `--all` to
remove all queued events. This may be useful in the future for
breaking upgrades, or when the node operator is having a bad day.
* The `cib` program does not start unless it has a local node.
* There is a start of a user guide, which is published automatically
at <https://pages.radicle.liw.fi/ci-broker/userguide.html> for now.
The location is likely to change in the future.
* The front report page now says if the CI run succeeded or failed, if
the run has finished. Previously it only said the run had finished.
* The report pages are now updated whenever the state of a CI run
changes. This makes it easier to follow the run via a web browser.
Previously the pages were generated on a schedule.
## Version 0.7.0, released 2024-10-14
This release breaks many existing instances. The event filter
configuration needs to be reviewed upon upgrade, and the event queue
in the database needs to be emptied before running the new version.
### Breaking changes
* Internally, the CI broker now converts change events from the
Radicle node into "CI events". In previous versions of the CI broker
it used "broker events". CI events are different from broker events,
and aim to be more suitable for CI purposes. This also affects the
event filter in the CI broker configuration. See the new [user
guide](https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/radicle.liw.fi/rad:zwTxygwuz5LDGBq255RA2CbNGrz8/tree/doc/userguide.md)
for details on the CI events.
Note that in some simple cases, the old broker events match a new CI
event exactly, for filtering. As an example, a filter on a specific
branch is the same.
The CI event changes only affect the configuration file and the
database. The CI adapters and the messages communicating with them
are not affected. Existing adapters work as before.
### Bug fixes
* The CI broker no longer logs the sensitive environment variables in
clear text. Fix by Michalis.
* The CI broker no longer appends a "shut down" event to the event
queue when it loses connection to the local Radicle node. This was a
remnant of an old development phase, used to tell other threads in
the CI broker to terminate. There is now a better way to do that and
the spurious event is not needed. In fact, the spurious event would
be processed by the CI broker after it got re-started, meaning the
new process would immediately terminate. Ars long, vita brevis.
* The log message of the CI broker process ending with an
unrecoverable error is not logged at the error level instead of the
info level.
### Other changes
* A start of a CI broker user guide (aimed at node operators) has been
added to the source repository. It will be published by the CI
broker's CI on <https://pages.radicle.liw.fi/ci-broker/>.
* The CI broker now enables logging in trace and debug levels in
release builds.
* CI broker logging level can be set with new `--log-level` command
line option. This functionality was dropped when structured logging
was added. Note that the old way of controlling logging level with
an environment variable is still absent. Please open an issue if you
want it back.
* The CI broker now logs a lot more detail. Possibly too much detail.
* The `cibtool event add --base` options value is not rev-parsed. This
means a value like `HEAD` or `HEAD^` will work. Previously it had to
be a commit SHA.
## Version 0.6.3, released 2024-09-16
A very small release that I make mostly to keep up a weekly release
cadence.
* Fix bug where CI broker would crash (panic) when generating HTML
report pages. The cause was that it was assuming that each CI run
had a run ID assigned by the CI adapter, and that they were unique.
This was a faulty assumption. Luckily, all this code making the
assumption had been made superfluous by earlier changes, so it could
just be removed. This resulted in further simplification of the
report generation code, but those should not be visible to users.
* Add the `cibtool event record` subcommand, to listen on node events
and optionally write them to a file. As this uses the same code as
`cib` to subscribe to node events, it's a way for node operators to
verify that the CI broker can actually receive events.
* Add the `cibtool event broker` subcommand that reads a previously
recorded (or constructed) file with node events and produces the
corresponding broker events from them. This can be useful to create
test files for verifying that event filters work as intended, for
node operators.
* Add the `cibtool event filter` subcommand that reads a set of event
filter expressions from one file, and broker events from another
file, and writes out the events allowed by the filter. This is meant
to be useful for node operators to verify that their event filters
work as meant.
## Version 0.6.2, released 2024-09-10
A very small release that I make mostly to keep up a weekly release
cadence.
* `README.md` now documents dependencies that aren't Rust crates
needed to run the test suite.
* A small bug fix to the acceptance test suite. The dummy adapter used
in the suite did not read its stdin, so the adapter would sometimes
finish before the CI adapter wrote the trigger message to the
adapter's stdin, which failed, causing the whole test to fail.
## Version 0.6.1, released 2024-09-02
* This updates the dependencies on other Radicle crates, to make it
easier to `cargo install` the CI broker.
## Version 0.6.0, released 2024-09-02
### Breaking changes
* The CI broker test suite now verifies that it can be upgraded
without making changes to the configuration file or the database.
This should lessen how often accidental, unintended breaking
changes, so this counts as a user-visible lack of change. Note that
this testing doesn't prevent breaking changes from being made, but
makes it more likely that they'll be documented as such.
### New or changed features
* The CI broker now logs, to its own log, the standard error output of
the CI adapter it runs, as well as their exist code. This should
make it easier to debug problems in adapters, especially for the
developers of the adapters. The log messages look like:
~~~json
{"msg":"adapter exit code","level":"DEBG","ts":"2024-08-27T17:38:26.762222386Z","exit_code":1}
{"msg":"adapter stderr","level":"DEBG","ts":"2024-08-27T17:38:26.762289242Z","stderr":"woe be me\n"}
~~~
* The `cibtool event list` command now has a `--jdon` option to output
the event queue using the JSON format, for easier post-processing by
other software.
* The CI broker logs its git commit when it starts.
* The CI broker [`README.md`](README.md) lists the known CI adapter,
and links to documentation about using them.
## Version 0.5.0, released 2024-08-26
### Breaking changes
* All CI broker (`cib`) logging is now to the standard error output as
JSON Lines: each log message is on its own line as one JSON object.
This is a breaking change as it changes what is logged and how, and
this may matter to those consuming the log output.
The `RADICLE_CI_LOG` environment variable no longer affects CI
broker logging.
* The `cibtool run add` option `--alias` has been removed. It was
mis-named (repositories have names, not aliases), and also
unnecessary, as the program can look up the repository name itself.
Related to this, the JSON output calls it `repo_name` instead of
`repo_alias`. However, when reading run information stored in the
database, the old name is still accepted.
### New or changed features
* The `cibtool run add` option `--repo` can now take a repository
name, instead of its id, if there is exactly one repository with
that name in the local node.
* The HTML report front page now lists the current queue of
unprocessed events, except for events for private repositories. The
JSON status page includes the length of the queue.
## Version 0.4.0, released 2024-08-19
This is the fourth release. In breaking with tradition, it does not
have significant breaking changes.
### Breaking changes
* The `cibtool run list` command now lists only the identifiers of CI
runs, one per line, by default. An option `--json` was added to get
all the information in a format that's easy to parse with a program.
This is a breaking change if you parse the output of the command
with another command.
* The `cibtool run add` command no longer has a `--finished` option.
It is now enough to use `--successful` or `--failure`. The dropped
option was always used with one of those two, and those two were
always used with the dropped option, so the dropped one was
pointless and provided no extra information. It was just extra work
for the user.
### Bug fixes
* The CI broker handles errors without panicking now. Instead of a
stack trace, an actual error message is shown. This may be more
friendly to most people.
* The CI broker now depends on Radicle 0.12.0, to say more current
with changes in Radicle.
* The `cibtool run add` command sets the state correctly if the run
has finished. Previously it was set to "triggered".
* Several instances of "CI" being spelled as "Ci" have been fixed, in
log messages and help texts.
### New or changed features
* The HTML report pages produced by the CI broker are now a little
more readable.
* The various parts of the running CI broker now notify each other
that there have been changes so that the other parts can do what
they need to do at once, instead of checking on a fixed schedule.
This means, for example, that the HTML report pages for a run are
updated at once, instead of once a minute.
* The `cib` and `cibtool` commands now both have an option `--version`
to show the version number of the program.
* The `cibtool trigger` command makes it easier to trigger a CI run.
This duplicates the functionality of `cibtool event add`, but is a
little simpler to remember, and a little safer to use. The trigger
command makes sure the base commit is always set in the event it
creates. (The command to add an event does not, in cases users
really want that behavior.)
* Each CI run now has two identifiers: one invented by the CI broker
itself, guaranteed to be unique, and one chosen by the adapter,
meant to reflect the identifier used by an external CI system, and
guaranteed to be unique. Everywhere the user refers to a CI run,
either ID is accepted, as long as the adapter one is unambiguous.
When a run ID is shown, both kinds are shown.
* During a CI run, when anything happens, the information about the
run is updated in the database at once, instead of at the end of
the run. This means the change is not lost in case the CI broker is
terminated before the run finishes.
* New commands `cibtool run show` and `cibtool run update` to show
information about a run, and update it. The updating is probably
mostly only relevant to those writing test suites for the CI broker.
* Started documenting the acceptance criteria for logging in the CI
broker, and how to verify that the criteria are met. This will
probably continue over the next few releases. As part of this, the
stakeholders are documented. In this release the list of
stakeholders is quite rudimentary and the CI broker developers would
like to hear from you if you have any wants or needs about the CI
broker, whether about logging or otherwise.
Additionally, this takes the first small steps towards having
structured logging.
## Version 0.3.0, released 2024-07-18
This is the third release. It breaks all existing installations.
### Bug fixes
* The CI broker now parses Git ref names for node identifiers more
correctly.
* When the node sends an event about a branch having changed, the CI
broker now allows the branch name to have slashes.
### New or changed features
* The `ci-broker` program has been replaced with the `cib` program,
which is better in a few ways. Most importantly, it persists the
node events that need to be processed, in a queue, so that they are
not lost when the CI broker is re-started. The persistent storage is
in the form of an SQLite database file: `ci-broker` used it already,
but `cib` puts more information in it. There is also a list of all
CI runs `cib` has performed.
* The `cibtool` program has been added to allow the node operator to
manage `cib`, via the SQLite database file. `cibtool` lets the
operator to view and manipulate the node event queue, and the list
of CI runs, and to generate HTML report pages from information in
the database. (`cib` generates the same report pages when running:
`cibtool` functionality is there just in case.)
* CI broker logging continues to be inconsistent and helpful mainly to
those developing the CI broker itself. Some logging has been
removed, to avoid so called logspam.
* The code has been refactored a lot, for simplicity. This should be
invisible to others, especially the adapter implementations, but
just in case, be aware something externally visible may have changed
inadvertently.
* The `BrokerEvent::is_allowed` method is no longer exposed in the CI
broker public API. If you need it, let us know.
* The CI broker now logs the executable filename of the adapter it
runs.
* The acceptance criteria for the CI broker are now documented in more
detail in the subplot (see `ci-broker.md` and the
[Subplot](https://subplot.tech/) software). The subplot document is
available as
[HTML](https://pages.radicle.liw.fi/ci-broker/ci-broker.html).
* Various undocumented helper programs have been dropped from the CI
broker. Their functionality, if needed, can be added to `cibtool` in
the future.
## Version 0.2.0, released 2024-06-06
This is the second release.
### Bug fixes
* The CI broker now picks the newest commit in a patch or branch,
rather than the oldest. This means changes to a patch or branch get
processed by CI, rather than only the first version. (Lars
Wirzenius)
* Error messages are a little clearer now. An unclear error message is
a bug. (Lars Wirzenius)
* Problems with the adapter sub-process failing are handled better
now. (Lars Wirzenius)
* If the CI broker loses its connection to the Radicle node, the
broker now terminates. Previously, it would keep trying to receive a
message from the broken connection, which it would never receive,
since the connection was broken in a way that it would not be mended
even if the node is restarted. Computers are very patient, and never
give up hope, so the CI broker was willing to wait until the heat
death of the universe, or a power outage, whichever came first.
Now, something like `systemd` can be used to restart the CI broker
if this happens, and the system will recover. (Lars Wirzenius)
### New or changed features
* The CI broker depend on the version of the `radicle` crate that
corresponds to the Radicle (heartwood) version 1.0.0 release
candidate 10. This makes it possible to use the CI broker with the
current version of Radicle. (Lars Wirzenius)
* The adapter protocol now allows an adapter to give the CI broker a
URL related to the CI run. This can be used to link to a build log,
for example. (Lars Wirzenius)
* The node event filter now has an `AnyPushRef` condition. (Michalis
Zampetakis)
* The CI broker architecture documentation is now published to
<https://pages.radicle.liw.fi/ci-broker/architecture.html> by CI
whenever the CI broker is changed. (Lars Wirzenius)
* The logging for event handling a lot more verbose. This is useful
for debugging problems, but is otherwise so noisy logs become nearly
useless. (Lars Wirzenius)
* The documentation for the broker/adapter protocol should be up to
date. (Michalis Zampetakis)
* The CI broker configuration now has the `sensitive_envs` field to
allow specifying environment variables that should not be logged.
(Lars Wirzenius)
* The CI broker can now be shut down cleanly. This is mostly useful
for testing, though, at least for now, but opens up the possibility
of shutting down only after any in-progress CI runs having finished
first. (Lars Wirzenius)
## Version 0.1.0, released 2024-04-03
This was the first release. No notes.