A while back I heard about Big Flashing DevOps Thing which shows you how to build a LED sign using a Raspberry Pi + BlinkyTape to display the current status of your build/deployments. Pretty cool!
Big Flashing DevOps Thing
But at Hyperfish we are using Travis CI for our builds/tests, not Jenkins that the provided code currently supports.
Time to tweak!
The source for the original project is available on Github here: https://github.com/muce/SAWS and includes most of what you already need. It has two parts to it:
- bash scripts that you schedule to download the status of a project and log it to a file
- a python script that reads the log files and updates the sign appropriately
To get this working with Travis CI it was a fairly simple job of tweaking a copy of the existing bash script to download the Travis build status. Travis provides both XML or JSON feeds secured with a simple authentication token on the query string. Example below:
<Projects> <Project name="Hyperfish/hyperfish.com" activity="Sleeping" lastBuildStatus="Success" lastBuildLabel="48" lastBuildTime="2015-09-25T20:47:25.000+0000" webUrl="https://magnum.travis-ci.com/Hyperfish/hyperfish.com" /> </Projects>
The bash script simply downloads this feed, parses out the relevant information and then writes the appropriate color settings for the LEDs to a log file. If the script sees the build is working it writes a number corresponding to Green in the log file. It does this for however many repos you want to monitor.
The full travis script is here: https://github.com/LoungeFlyZ/SAWS/blob/master/travis.sh
(I have submitted a Pull Request to the original repo to add this support for Travis too)
Here is a short video of my BlinkyTape updating status and setting the lights. In my case I set it up to monitor 3 repos in Travis, so the tape is divided into three sections to show status for each one.
This all requires a working Raspberry Pi and a basic knowledge of running scripts in Linux. In my case I am running it with Raspbian (a Linux distro for the Pi).