SoftFab

Web application for orchestrating build and test execution

Read here more about SoftFab. You also can take a look at the SoftFab factory where we build and test SoftFab itself.

Work in Progress

SoftFab in its current state is not easy to install and installations should not be exposed to untrusted networks like the internet. You are welcome to take a look, but to actually use SoftFab, we recommend waiting for the 3.0.0 release that we're working towards.

Feedback

You can report bugs and make feature requests in SoftFab's issue tracker at GitHub.

If you are interested in sponsoring a new feature, contact us at Boxing Beetle.

Contributing

SoftFab requires Python 3.6 or later. It also needs Graphviz to layout execution graphs. The development environment is managed by Poetry, which requires curl and pip to be installed.

If you are using Debian or a Linux distribution derived from Debian such as Ubuntu, you need to install the packages python3, python3-pip, python-pip, curl and graphviz.

When you have the required packages installed, you can fetch the SoftFab source code from its Git repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/boxingbeetle/softfab.git

SoftFab uses Poetry to manage its development environment. Using the recommended installation procedure instead of pip helps separate Poetry's dependencies from those of the software it manages, like SoftFab.

Create a virtual environment managed by Poetry:

$ cd softfab
$ poetry env use python3

Start a shell in this virtual environment:

$ poetry shell

Install SoftFab and its runtime and development dependencies:

$ poetry install

Now you should have the softfab command available in the Poetry shell:

$ softfab --version
SoftFab version 3.0.0-pre1

This command runs SoftFab directly from the source tree, so any code you edit is active the next time you run the softfab command.

Now you can create a database directory to test with. The suggested location is a directory named run at the top of your cloned Git work area:

$ softfab --dir run init

By default this will configure the SoftFab Control Center to run on localhost at port 8100. If you want different settings, check softfab init --help for options or edit the generated configuration file run/softfab.ini.

You can now start the Control Center using the following command:

$ softfab --dir run --debug server --anonoper

The --debug option enables more detailed logging and other debug features. The --anonoper option will give any visitor to the Control Center operator privileges, so you don't need to log in while testing. These options are strictly for development and should not be enabled in production.

You can now access the Control Center by entering its URL in your web browser. If you used the default configuration, the URL will be http://localhost:8100/.

One of the tools Poetry will install for you is Invoke, which can be used to perform a few useful developer tasks. You can see the full list of tasks by running:

$ inv --list

You can for example use Invoke to start the Control Center using a shorter command line, assuming you used the suggested name run for your database directory:

$ inv run

Another task that can save time during development is isort, which runs the tool of the same name that sorts all import statements in the source code:

$ inv isort

Before submitting a pull request, please make sure the following tests pass:

• static type check (mypy): inv types
• unit tests (pytest): inv unittest

While we also use PyLint (inv lint), there are known issues reported by PyLint, mostly false positives but also some real but non-critical issues.