Setting up a buildslave instance remotely on OS X Lion

Byrce Lelbach has generously offered access to an OS X system as a metabuildbot slave. As I went about setting it up today, the process was not obvious, so I thought I’d share. This was interesting mostly because I only have SSH access to the host, so I cannot download things from the Apple Store or do any of the fancy point-and-click stuff that would make this easier.

First, I needed to get XCode installed. Note that the (much quicker to download) XCode command-line tools are not sufficient to build everything in MacPorts – in particular, they do not support building zlib, which is required for git-core.

I got my hands on a copy of “Install XCode.app”, and:

host:Downloads buildbot$ cd Install\ Xcode.app/Contents/
host:Contents buildbot$ sudo installer -package Resources/Xcode.mpkg -target /
Password:
installer: Package name is Xcode
installer: Upgrading at base path /
installer: The upgrade was successful.

Once this was done, I installed MacPorts:

host:Downloads buildbot$ hdiutil mount MacPorts-2.0.4-10.7-Lion.dmg
Checksumming Driver Descriptor Map (DDM : 0)…
    Driver Descriptor Map (DDM : 0): verified   CRC32 $A913D2D8
Checksumming Apple (Apple_partition_map : 1)…
....
    Apple (Apple_partition_map : 1): verified   CRC32 $A1DF5DC1
Checksumming disk image (Apple_HFS : 2)…
...... (...) .....
        disk image (Apple_HFS : 2): verified   CRC32 $5A3E74A0
Checksumming  (Apple_Free : 3)…
                    (Apple_Free : 3): verified   CRC32 $00000000
verified   CRC32 $D9641854
/dev/disk2              Apple_partition_scheme
/dev/disk2s1            Apple_partition_map
/dev/disk2s2            Apple_HFS                       /Volumes/MacPorts-2.0.4
host:Downloads buildbot$ pushd /Volumes/MacPorts-2.0.4/
/Volumes/MacPorts-2.0.4 ~/Downloads
host:MacPorts-2.0.4 buildbot$ sudo installer -package MacPorts-2.0.4.pkg/ -target /
Password:
installer: Package name is MacPorts-2.0.4
installer: Installing at base path /
installer: The install was successful.
host:MacPorts-2.0.4 buildbot$ popd
host:Downloads buildbot$ hdiutil unmount /Volumes/MacPorts-2.0.4

and we’re off to the races.

I added /opt/local/bin to my path as suggested, and then followed the normal MacPorts setup process.

Finishing up the buildslave install required installing Git (which manages to pull in unreasonable amounts of other stuff!)

host:Contents buildbot$ sudo  /opt/local/bin/port install git-core -credential_osxkeychain-doc-pcre-python27

which is required for the source steps, then creating a virtualenv to install buildbot-slave:

host:~ buildbot$ virtualenv sandbox
New python executable in sandbox/bin/python
Installing setuptools............done.
Installing pip...............done.
host:~ buildbot$ source sandbox/bin/activate
(sandbox)host:~ buildbot$ pip install buildbot-slave
...

and then create and start a slave:

(sandbox)host:~ buildbot$ buildslave create-slave buildslave buildbot.buildbot.net:9989 HOSTNAME PASS
...
(sandbox)host:~ buildbot$ buildslave start buildslave
...

I then followed the helpful advice here to set up a plist that will start the daemon on boot.

Code Vigorous

Setting up a buildslave instance remotely on OS X Lion