Description

ProjectMonitor is a CI display aggregator. It displays the status of multiple Continuous Integration builds on a single web page. The intent is that you display the page on a big screen monitor or TV so that the status of all your projects' builds are highly visible/glanceable (a "Big Visible Chart"). ProjectMonitor currently supports:

We use ProjectMonitor internally at Pivotal Labs to display the status of the builds for all our client projects. We also have an instance of ProjectMonitor running at ci.pivotallabs.com that we use for displaying the status of the builds of various open source projects - both of projects Pivotal Labs maintains (such as Jasmine) and of non-Pivotal projects (such as Rails).

In practice, ProjectMonitor is often displayed on publicly-viewable monitors mounted to the wall. This provides transparency into the health of the build(s) that entire team can see at a glance. When a build goes red (fails), the next person or pair to finish their story can take a look at what broke before starting new work. If a build goes red a lot over a period of time, it can prompt a conversation about what isn't working.

ProjectMonitor in use

Installation
Custom Configuration
In-app Configuration
Deployment
Ideas and Improvements

Linked Documents

Installation

Get the code

To get the code, execute the following:

git clone git://github.com/pivotal/projectmonitor.git
cd projectmonitor

Get Docker

ProjectMonitor provides a one-line setup using Docker

Download and install docker from the official Docker website

Run the app locally with the default configuration

docker run -p 3000:3000 -v `pwd`:/projectmonitor pivotaliad/project-monitor \
bash -c "cd projectmonitor && bundle install && RAILS_ENV=development rake local:start"

The app will be available at: http://0.0.0.0:3000

Add a user:

docker exec CONTAINER_ID_OR_NAME \
bash -c 'cd projectmonitor && \
echo "User.create!(login: \"jane\", name: \"Jane Martinez\", email: \"jmartinez@example.com\", password: \"password\")" | \
rails c development'

To stop: docker kill <container-id>

Local development

docker run -it -p 3000:3000 -v `pwd`:/projectmonitor pivotaliad/project-monitor

Inside the container run:

bundle install

To run tests:

rake local:test

see Custom Configuration for DB setup

Custom configuration

Set up the database

You'll need a database. Create it with whatever name you want. For defaults, copy database.yml.example to database.yml. Edit the production environment configuration so it's right for your database:

First, get the defaults copied:

cp config/database.yml.example config/database.yml

Edit the defaults in config/database.yml

Create the db and set the tables:

RAILS_ENV=production rake db:create
RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate

Authentication support

IP Whitelist

If you want to use Webhooks, your ProjectMonitor instance will need to be located on a publicly accessible server. If you don't want your ProjectMonitor dashboard to also be publicly accessible, you can whitelist access by IP address.

The whitelist is disabled by default, but can be enabled by uncommenting the "ip_whitelist" property in settings.yml and adding a list of IP addresses to whitelist. If you're running ProjectMonitor behind a load balancer (e.g. on a hosted provider such as Heroku), you'll probably want to set "ip_whitelist_request_proxied" to true. See settings.yml for more documentation.

Password authentication

Project monitor uses Devise to provide both database backed authentication and Google OAuth2 logins.

Regular password authentication for managing project settings is enabled by default. Run rake db:seed with the environment variables PROJECT_MONITOR_LOGIN, PROJECT_MONITOR_EMAIL and PROJECT_MONITOR_PASSWORD set to create a new account.

To switch off password auth, set password_auth_enabled setting to false. To ensure strong password encryption you should adjust the value for password_auth_pepper and password_auth_stretches appropriately.

Google OAuth2 setup

To use Google OAuth2 authentication you need Google apps set up for your domain and the following configuration options specified:

oauth2_enabled: true
oauth2_apphost: 'MY_APP_ID'
oauth2_secret: 'MY_SECRET'

Setup Cron with Whenever

We have included a sample whenever gem config in config/schedule.rb. Refer to the whenever documentation for instructions on how to integrate it with your deployment. Refer to Heroku scheduler documentation for instructions on how to integrate the rake task with your Heroku deployment.

The default schedule clears log entries and cleans up unused tags daily, and fetches project statuses every 3 minutes.

The fetch project task is what goes out and hits the individual builds. We find that if you do this too frequently it can swamp the builds. On the other hand, you don't want ProjectMonitor displaying stale information. At Pivotal we set it up to run every 3 minutes.

Start workers

The cron job above will add jobs to the queue, which workers will execute. To start running the workers, use the following command:

rake start_workers

The default number of workers is 2, but if you wanted 3 you would call it like this:

rake start_workers[3]

These workers need only be started once per system reboot, and must be running for your project statuses to update. To stop the workers, run this command:

rake stop_workers

The workers are implemented using the delayed_job gem. The workers are configured to have a maximum timeout of 1 minute when polling project status. If you want to change this setting, you can edit config/initializers/delayed_job_config.rb

Start the application

Execute:

nohup rails server -e production &> projectmonitor.log

Next Steps

Now you need to add a project or two! Keep reading the In-app Configuration section for instructions.

In-app Configuration

Each build that you want ProjectMonitor to display is called a "project" in ProjectMonitor. You can log in to set up projects by clicking the "Manage Projects" link in the bottom-right corner of the main ProjectMonitor screen. You can either create a user using the console as follows:

rails c production
User.create!(login: 'john', name: 'John Doe', email: 'jdoe@example.com', password: 'password')

Or, if you have set up Google OAuth2 as per above, you can simply log in with Google to create a new user account.

Admin Interface

Click 'manage projects' at the lower right to edit project details.

Add Projects

We have instructions detailing how to add a project.

Importing and Exporting Configurations

You can export your configuration for posterity or to be transferred to another host:

rake projectmonitor:export > ${your_configuration.yml}

Or using heroku:

heroku run rake projectmonitor:export --app projectmonitor-staging > ${your_configuration.yml}

Or you can download it using the configuration endpoint, using curl (or your web browser):

curl --user ${username}:${password} ${your_project_monitor_host}/configuration > ${your_configuration.yml}

NOTE: That heroku doesn't treat STDERR and STDOUT differently so you may get some warnings at the beginning of the generated file that you'll have to remove manually.

It can be imported in a similar way:

rake projectmonitor:import < ${your_configuration.yml}

On heroku or another host which doesn't allow you to directly load files or read from stdin, you'll need to post the file to the configuration endpoint like so:

curl --user ${username}:${password} -F "content=@-" ${your_project_monitor_host}/configuration < ${your_configuration.yml}

Deployment

Cloud Foundry

ProjectMonitor requires a database that can handle more than 4 concurrent connections, otherwise occasional errors might pop up.

Create a CF space and add a db service named rails-mysql

The default way to deploy to CF is using the attached concourse pipeline. Follow the concourse installation steps to setup concourse-ci.

create a credentials yml at concourse/projectmonitor-production-credentials.yml

populate it with

api-endpoint: <replace with CF api endpoint ex: api.run.cfapps.io>
cf-username: <replace with CF username>
cf-password: <replace with CF password>
cf-org: <rep

Projectmonitor

Install / Use

README