Announcing edash
I’ve been hinting at the dashboard application I’ve been hacking on recently and after showing it off to a few people at the Scottish Ruby Conference it’s about time I released it open source.
Introducing edash
This is the version currently running on a screen at Eden.
IMPORTANT NOTE: This application only works on Chrome. There is enough browser specific hackery to render it unusable in other browsers currently. Patches to fix this are most welcome.
That said, I’ve put together a short screencast showing it off, along with how to get it running:
edash demo and usage instructions from Chris Parsons on Vimeo.
Getting it running
Here’s a minimal set of steps to get it running:
gem install sinatra haml json eventmachine em-http-request
git clone git://github.com/edendevelopment/edash.git
cd edash
git submodule update --init
# runs the websocket server, make sure port 8080 is readable from where you are. Use nohup to run as a daemon.
scripts/server &
# Run rackup in place, or use your favourite rack-compatible server
rackup &
# post a message to the server. Add a form of this to your build hooks.
curl -d "project=<project>" -d "status=<pass|fail|building>" [-d "author=Name <email>"] -- http://localhost:9292/buildCheck out the screencast for a walkthrough.
Under the hood
The code is on github.
Check it out and let me know if you find it useful. I’m trying to keep it pretty thin and build server agnostic: it should work with a number of build servers out of the box just by configuring (hacking) your server to fire off HTTP posts as shown in the screencast.
I’d welcome patches and fixes: it should be under fairly active development in the next few weeks. The plan is to add a generic statistic tracking module that will allow us to keep track of MetricFu stats, and you to keep track of almost anything… watch this blog for updates.
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Radiating status at Eden
Information Radiators are always a good idea for software teams, and I’ve been pondering how best to show project state at Eden Development for a while.
Here are the various iterations we’ve been through:
Iteration 1: Build status messages
We’ve had a continuous integration server running on integrity for several months, and we wanted to make it obvious how we were doing, so we got an old mac mini out and plugged in a big monitor. That way everyone could see whether our builds were passing or failing. We set the mac to come on at 9am and turn off at 6pm in System Preferences, and used Plainview to display full screen.
This worked well, except that our builds don’t fail that often: our current projects have short enough builds that developers can still get away with running all the tests locally.
Iteration 2: Enter the cycling metric_fu graphs
We have metric_fu running on a private site anyway, but the stats weren’t very visible. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could see our code stats publicly across the whole company? So we split the screen into two halves using a frameset:
Each of our projects now cycles through the most important pages from the metric_fu library, for each of our live projects. That way, if there’s a big change in the graphs one day, everyone can see that there’s a problem and can dive in and fix it.
Iteration 3: Cramming more stuff in
So far so good, but we had some blank space down the bottom left! So we shoehorned in part of Pairyapp’s interface, so that everyone could see who was working with who.
This was nice, because people can suddenly see who’s working on a task on their own, and then jump in as needed. It stopped me trawling round the office just to find somebody: now I can easily see exactly who’s doing what (picture at the bottom).
Iteration 4: First pass on our own build server dashboard
This worked well, for about ten days…
…until we saw this. Our little solution was immediately not good enough and I set to work on make it shinier.
At about the same time we changed to using CI Joe for building our projects. The way we got that working is detailed here.
CI Joe doesn’t come with an integrated dashboard, so I set to work writing my own. Here’s where I’ve got to so far:
It’s not open source yet, but I plan to make it so soon. The pictures are of the person or pair who made the last commit.
Iteration 5: The final result
And here’s how our screen looks this morning:
(sorry about the censorship)
It’s not finished yet, I’ve plenty more plans. Expect another few posts on this in the future.
UPDATE: Added link to CI Joe post and explained pictures on the dashboard app.
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