channon

channon

Channon is a continuous integration system that doesn't try to do a bunch of things half-assed. Instead, it tries to do only a few things full-assed.

You define plans to describe how you want things to be run, and each plan can contain multiple steps. Each step is a simple text file which gets dumped onto the disk, made executable, and then executed. This means that whatever kind of script you want to write, you just make sure to put the correct hashbang in the first line and as long as your system has the binary you need, it'll run your script with that binary.

Channon is completely agnostic about the kinds of scripts you write the steps for your plan in. Want to use Python? Ruby? Bash? Scala? Go right ahead. If any step returns a non-zero value, Channon marks the run as a failure.

You can configure notifications to fire on the following conditions:

• Every run
• Every failure
• Only when the run's status is different from the previous run

Notification scripts are just as flexible as the step scripts, but they also have access to the stdout and stderr from the previous steps available in files so you can email, jabber, IRC, whatever, to tell people that a new run just finished, or that runs just started failing (or passing!), etc.

The same “shoot yourself with a bowel disruptor” attitude is applied to version control. Make the first step in a plan a script to check the code out fresh every time, or get a little more fancy and make it check out the first time and then do updates afterwards. Or forget version control entirely if you want, and just run simple scripts repeatedly.

Jobs can be triggered via HTTP request or scheduled using cron-style syntax.

Channon's API embodies my ideas about what a modern server API should look like, which means that it may be completely insane to you. Most interactions will be over JSON, although there are also EventStream endpoints so that if you want to drink from the firehose, you can. No GUI of any kind is built in, but it should be straightforward to implement one using a native toolkit or HTML5.