Understanding Jenkins builds¶

This page documents what different Jenkins builds actually run from the GROMACS source tree. The purpose is two-fold:

Provide information on how to interpret Jenkins failures and how to run the same tasks locally to diagnose issues (in most cases, referring to the special targets described in Build system overview).
Provide information on what changes in the build system (or other parts of the repository) need special care to not break Jenkins builds.

Separate page documents how to interact with the Jenkins UI for these builds: <no title>. <no title> has information on how to do common things with Jenkins builds.

Pre-submit verification¶

The following builds are triggered for each patch set uploaded to Gerrit.

Compilation and tests¶

The main build compiles GROMACS with different configurations and runs the tests. The configurations used for Jenkins verification are specified in admin/builds/pre-submit-matrix.txt.

The exact build sequence can be found in admin/builds/gromacs.py, including the logic that translates the build options in the matrix file to CMake options.

Documentation¶

This build builds various types of documentation:

PDF reference manual using LaTeX
Doxygen documentation extracted from the source code
Set of HTML pages containing an installation guide, a user guide, and a developer guide, as well as links to the above. This set of HTML pages can be browsed from Jenkins.
Man pages
INSTALL text file

The last three require building the gmx binary and running it, so compilation failures will also show in this build. All log files that contain warnings are archived as artifacts in the build, and presence of any warnings marks the build unstable. Brief description of which part failed is reported back to Gerrit.

Additionally, the build runs some source code checks that rely on the Doxygen documentation. See the description of the check-source target in Source tree checker scripts.

Using Doxygen provides general guidelines for Doxygen usage, which can be helpful in understanding and solving Doxygen warnings and some of the check-source issues. Guidelines for #include directives provides guidelines for #include order and style, which is another part of check-source checks.

The exact build sequence is in admin/builds/documentation.py. See that file for details of what it exactly builds and how. Most changes in the documentation build system will require changes in this script, but Jenkins configuration should be more static.

clang static analysis¶

The exact build sequence and the CMake configuration used is in admin/builds/clang-analysis.py. This file also specifies the clang version used for the analysis.

cppcheck¶

This build runs the cppcheck static analysis tool. Any issues found mark the build unstable, and can be browsed in Jenkins.

It runs cmake to generate the build system, and then builds the cppcheck target. Nothing is compiled by this target, it only runs cppcheck for the designated source files. The CMake configuration options do not affect the set of files checked, but they do affect the checked code through config.h and such.

The exact build sequence and the CMake configuration used is in admin/builds/cppcheck.py.

uncrustify¶

This build checks the source code for formatting such as consistent indentation and use of braces, as well as for copyright headers. See Guidelines for code formatting for the guidelines that are enforced.

The exact build sequence is in admin/builds/uncrustify.py, which essentially just runs

admin/uncrustify.sh check --rev=HEAD^

If the any changes are required, the build is marked unstable. If the script completely fails (should be rare), the build fails. A file with issues found by the script is archived as an artifact in the build, and a summary is reported back to Gerrit (or the actual issues if there are only a few). See Automatic source code formatting for more details on uncrustify and on scripts to run it.

On-demand builds¶

These builds can be triggered on request for certain changes in Gerrit, or manually from Jenkins.

Coverage¶

This build compiles one configuration of GROMACS with instrumentation for coverage, runs the tests, and produces a coverage report using gcovr. The report can be browsed on Jenkins.

The exact build sequence is in admin/builds/coverage.py, including specification of the configuration tested.

Source tarball¶

This build creates the source tarball for distribution. Some of the content that is put into the tarball is generated by executing the gmx binary, so this build also compiles the source code (with a minimal set of options).

The build compiles the code and those targets that generate content necessary for the tarball, followed by building the package_source target. After that, it just generates a file that is used by other builds.

The exact build sequence is in admin/builds/source-package.py.

Release workflow¶

This build creates source and regressiontest tarballs, builds, installs, and tests a few configuration using those, and builds documentation to be placed on the documentation web site for a new release. The set of configurations tested is specified in admin/builds/release-matrix.txt.

The exact build sequence is desribed in releng repository (missing). The build uses the source tarball build as a subbuild, and parts of the build are executed using admin/builds/gromacs.py and admin/builds/documentation.py.