community-tc-config

This repository defines a tool to manage the runtime configuration for the Taskcluster deployment at https://community-tc.services.mozilla.com/. It uses tc-admin to examine and update the deployment. See that library's documentation for background on how the process works.

Background

A Taskcluster deployment has a collection of resources such a roles, hooks, and worker pools, that define its behavior. These can all be managed via the Taskcluster API, but managing them by hand is error-prone and difficult to track over time. This tool exists to manage those resources in a controlled, observable way. It does so by making API calls to determine the current state, examining this repository to determine the desired state, and then "applying" the necessary changes to get from the former to the latter.

A deployment is also defined by a number of back-end settings that are not available in the API. These are defined by the service configuration. While this tool cannot change those settings, it does depend on them, and they are described here.

Quick Start

If you would like to propose a change to the configuration of the Community-TC deployment, you are in the right spot. You should already have an understanding of the resources you would like to modify. See the Taskcluster Documentation or consult with the Taskcluster team -- we are responsible for managing this deployment, and happy to help -- if you need assistance.

Begin by installing this app by running pip install -e . in this directory. Then, run

TASKCLUSTER_ROOT_URL=https://community-tc.services.mozilla.com tc-admin diff --without-secrets

This will show you the current difference between what's defined in your local repository and the runtime configuration of the deployment. Most of the time, there should be no difference.

Then, change the configuration in this repository, using the comments in the relevant files as a guide. After making a change to the configuration, you can examine the results by running tc-admin diff again. If you are adding or removing a number of resources, you can use --ids-only to show only the names of the added or removed resources. See tc-admin --help for more useful command-line tricks.

Applying changes (community-tc administrators only)

When the main branch is updated, typically a community-tc administrator will apply the changes.

Note to community-tc administrators: you may need to use the root client to run tc-admin apply <options>... successfully, i.e.

export TASKCLUSTER_ROOT_URL=https://community-tc.services.mozilla.com
export TASKCLUSTER_CLIENT_ID=static/taskcluster/root
export TASKCLUSTER_ACCESS_TOKEN=<root access token>
unset TASKCLUSTER_CERTIFICATE

where the value for <root access token> can be shown by running the command pass show community-tc/root.

Conventions

This deployment follows the convention of project namespaces. Each project has a its own worker pools, and user roles can be given "admin" access to the project.

Repositories are granted scopes via the Taskcluster-github scheme. Each repository is associated with a project, and scopes granted to the repository should be associated with that project. This occurs within config/projects.yml.

Secrets

The tool can manage secrets directly, but this requires access to secret values, and is thus limited to a smaller group of people: the Taskcluster team. Those people use --with-secrets, which automatically reads from the team's password storage repository.

In general, per-project secrets can either be managed by this tool, or managed directly by the project admins. See the comments in projects.yml for details.

Externally Managed Projects and Resources

This repository manages all resources in the deployment except those associated with "externally managed" projects. Projects that manage their own resources, either by hand or via their own automation, should have the externallyManaged attribute set in config/projects.yml, otherwise the next run of tc-admin apply will delete the project's resources! Note that externally managed projects can still define other resources in their projects.yml stanza. Such resources will be created and managed by this repository, but if they are removed from projects.yml, this repository cannot delete them.

The externallyManaged attribute can be set to true (only resources explicitly mentioned should be managed by this repo; unknown resources will not be deleted) or false (all resources are managed by this repo; unknown resources will be deleted), or to a regular expression or list of regular expressions. These regular expressions describe resource IDs of resources that are managed externally. For example, if the project darjeeling dynamically creates hooks with prefix project-darjeeling/dynamic-, it it would set

  externallyManaged:
    - "Hook=project-darjeeling/dynamic-.*"

Image Sets

To build a set of machine images in GCP/AWS/Azure, see the imagesets subdirectory.

Code Style

The Python code here follows Black.

pip install black
black generate

The YAML in config/ is linted with yamllint's "relaxed" preset, and without checking line length.

pip install yamllint
yamllint config

Pre-commit checks

If you would like your staged files to be checked for errors you can do so by installing pre-commit with: pip install pre-commit and pre-commit install.