A simple Odoo runbot lookalike on kubernetes. Main goal is replacing the OCA runbot.

This program is a Kubernetes operator that manages Odoo instances with pre-installed addons. The addons come from commits on branches and pull requests in GitHub repositories. A deployment of a given commit of a given branch or pull request of a given repository is known as a build.

Runboat has the following main components:

• An in-memory database of deployed builds, with their current status.

• A REST API to list builds and trigger new deployments as well as start, stop, redeploy or undeploy builds.

• A GitHub webhook to automatically trigger new builds on pushes to branches and pull requests of supported repositories and branches (configured via regular expressions).

• A controller that performs the following tasks:

  • monitor deployments in a kubernetes namespaces to maintain the in-memory database;
  • on new deployments, trigger an initialization job to check out the GitHub repo, install dependencies, create the corresponding postgres database and install the addons in it;
  • initialization jobs are started concurrently up to a configured limit;
  • when the initialization job succeeds, preserve the database, filestore, and virtual environment, so everything is ready for an almost instantaneous startup;
  • when the initialization job fails, flag the deployment as failed;
  • when there are too many deployments started, stop the oldest started;
  • when there are too many deployments, delete the oldest created;
  • when a deployment is deleted, run a cleanup job to drop the database and delete all kubernetes resources associated with the deployment.

This approach allows the deployment of a very large number of builds which consume no memory nor CPU until they are started. The number of started deployment can also be high, by reserving limited CPU and memory resources for each, taking advantage of the fact that they are typically used infrequently. The number of concurrent initialization jobs is limited strongly, and they are queued, as these are typically the more resource-intensive part of the lifecycle of builds.

All state is stored in kubernetes resources (labels and annotations on deployments). The controller can be stopped and restarted without losing state.

In practice the runboat controller does not know that it is deploying Odoo. All the knowledge about what is deployed is in the src/runboat/kubefiles directory. The kubefiles must implement a specific contract to be managed by the runboat controller. This contract is described in the Kubernetes resources section below.

For running the builds:

• A namespace in a kubernetes cluster.
• A wildcard DNS domain that points to the kubernetes ingress.
• A postgres database, accessible from within the cluster namespace with a user with permissions to create databases.

For running the controller (runboat itself):

• Python 3.12
• sqlite3 >= 3.25
• kubectl
• A KUBECONFIG or an in-cluster service account that provides access to the namespace where the builds are deployed, with permissions to create and delete Service, Job, Deployment, PersistentVolumeClaim, Ingress, Secret and ConfigMap resources as well as read and watch Deployments and Jobs.
• Some sort of reverse proxy to expose the REST API.

The controller can be run outside the kubernetes cluster or deployed inside it, or even in a different cluster.

A typical deployment looks like this.

The wiki has an example docker-compose configuration to get you started with running the runboat controller.

In that docker compose, you must provide configuration parameters for the postgres database and the kubernetes cluster:

• For postgres: host, port, user, password (the postgres user must exist and have permissions to create databases).
• For kubernetes:
  • The name of the kubernetes namespace where the builds are deployed.
  • A KUBECONFIG for a kubernetes account that can create and delete resources in that namespace.
  • The name of a kubernetes Storage Class that can allocate Persistent Volumes that are reclaimed on delete.
  • The DNS domain corresponding to a wildcard DNS entry pointing to the kubernetes ingress (so if your wildcard DNS record is *.runboat-builds.mydomain.com, you provide runboat-builds.mydomain.com).

Note that you can deploy Runboat itself as well Postgres outside or inside the kubernetes cluster, or even a different one, depending on your taste.

All resources to be deployed in kubernetes for a build are in src/runboat/kubefiles. They are gathered together from a kustomization.yaml jinja template that leads to three possible resource groups depending on a mode variable in the jinja rendering context:

• deployment creates a kubernetes deployment with its associated resources (pvc, service, ingress, ...);
• initialization creates a job that creates the database;
• cleanup creates a job that drops the database;

Besides the three modes, the controller has limited knowledge of what the kubefiles actually deploy. It expects the following to hold true:

• the runboat/build label is set on all resources, with the unique build name as value;

• a deployment starts with 0 replicas and is created with a runboat/init-status=todo label, as well as a runboat/cleanup finalizer;

• the intialization job and pods have a runboat/job-kind=initialize label;

• the cleanup job and pods have a runboat/job-kind=cleanup label.

• the following annotations are set on deployments:

  • runboat/repo: the repository in owner/repo format;
  • runboat/target-branch: the branch or pull request target branch;
  • runboat/pr: the pull request number if this build is for a pull request;
  • runboat/git-commit: the commit sha.

• the home page of a running build is exposed at http://{build_slug}.{build_domain}.

During the lifecycle of a build, the controller does the following on the deployed resources:

• it sets the runboat/init-status annotation (todo, started, succeeded, failed) on deployments to track the outcome of the initialization jobs;
• it sets the deployment's specs.replica to 1 or 0 to start or stop it;
• it deletes the deployment when an undeploy is requested (the actual delete occurs later due to the finalizer);
• it removes the deployment finalizers and deletes resources matching the runboat/build label after the cleanup job succeeded.

By default, Runboat relies on its bundled Kubefiles: src/runboat/kubefiles

But you can define:

• a different default path through environment variable RUNBOAT_BUILD_DEFAULT_KUBEFILES_PATH;
• a different path for a specific repo, by defining the kubefiles_path key in RUNBOAT_REPOS, e.g.:

RUNBOAT_REPOS=[{"repo": "^oca/.*", "branch": "^15.0$", "builds": [{"image": "ghcr.io/oca/oca-ci/py3.8-odoo15.0:latest", "kubefiles_path": "/tmp"}]}]

• setup environment variables (start from .env.sample, the meaning of the environment variables is documented in settings.py)
• create a virtualenv, make sure to have pip>=21.3.1 and pip install -c requirements.txt -e .[test]
• run with uvicorn runboat.app:app --log-config=log-config.yaml
• api documentation is at http://localhost:8000/docs
• run tests with pytest (environment variables used in tests are declared in .env.test)

gunicorn -w 1 -k runboat.uvicorn.RunboatUvicornWorker runboat.app:app.

One and only one worker process is allowed at the moment (although nothing really bad should happen if there is more).

Gunicorn also necessary so SIGINT/SIGTERM shutdowns after a few seconds. Since we use run_in_executor, SIGINT/SIGTERM handling does not work very well, and gunicorn makes it more robust. See https://bugs.python.org/issue29309. This should resolve itself when we switch to using an async kubernetes client (tracked in #6).

See environment variables examples in Dockerfile, .env.sample and their documentation in settings.py.

Authored by Stéphane Bidoul (@sbidoul) and contributors with support of ACSONE.

Contributions welcome.

Do not hesitate to reach out for help on how to get started.

runboat is distributed under the terms of the MIT license.