Compass Version 1.3

Linux Installation Guide

Compass consists of two applications, the Compass Server and the Compass Build Client. Compass must be installed on the computer that will be used as the Compass Server and on each computer that will be used as a Compass Build Client. The installation is the same for both the server and the build clients. After downloading Compass.tar.gz, simply extract the files into the directory where you want Compass to run.

The Compass installation requires Python 2.5.4 to be set up on each computer Compass is installed on. If Python is not included in your distribution, or is not installed then install the latest version of Python through your distribution's package management system.

Make sure that your PATH and PYTHONPATH environment variables are correctly defined and point to the correct version of Python.

Once you have verified python is installed and you have extracted the Compass distribution then both the Compass Server and the Compass Build Client are available to be run on that computer.

To Start the Compass Server on the machine you plan to use as your Compass Server, navigate to the extracted 'Compass' directory and in a shell execute the command:

>python start_app.py mastercfg.cfg &

NOTE: You may need to be root or to sudo in order for compass to start properly.

This will start the Compass Server with the default parameters found in the mastercfg.cfg file; for more details on the config file parameters see the config file format section in the full Compass documentation. The server should now be started on localhost. Open a web browser and navigate to 'http://localhost' (or to the address of the server if you are installing Compass remotely) and you should see a page that looks like this:

To complete the Compass Server installation enter an administrator username and password and click the 'Install Server' Button. Once you click this button you will be taken to the Server Administration page. The rest of the Compass Server setup is all platform independent. You can continue the quick setup in the next chapter of the documentation or read the full Compass Documentation for advanced topics.

Before any builds can execute on any platform however, there is one more platform dependent problem. We need to set up build clients on each platform that we want to Compass to be able to perform builds on. Here, we cover the Linux setup of a build client.

Set Up a Linux Build Client

To start a Compass Build Client on a Linux machine first uncompress the Compass distribution to a directory on the machine that you intend to use as a Compass Build Client and navigate into the root directory. Then, execute the following command:

>python start_app.py clientcfg.cfg & 

This starts the Compass Build Client with the default parameters in the clientcfg.cfg file, details of the clientcfg.cfg file can be found in the administrator manual. The most common setup is to run a build client on the same machine as the Compass Server, but if the Compass Build Client is on a different machine than the Compass Server the clientcfg.cfg file will require editing.

To test that the client is correctly started and connected, open a web browser and log in to the Compass web page. Click on the Build Monitor tab on the top menu and you should see a build client called linux-1:

And now compass is completely set up and ready to go. Builds will start at their next scheduled time or with the next repository change.

Many more advanced features of Compass are covered in other documentation pages on the Anx Labs partner site. For questions and comments please contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it