1. Make sure that all required packages for Exim to build successfully are installed. The minimal package requirements are the basic suite of compiler tools and basic libraries. You will also need to install the ccache package.
2. Create the master exim user (i.e. the user that Exim changes uid to when it runs in normal operation). I suggest the user **exim**. If you already have the Exim package provided by your distro installed, chances are good that you already have a user named **exim** or **exim4**. That user is fine. This howto also assumes you use the groupname **exim**.
3. Create a user that will run the Build Farm. I suggest the user **farm**. Due to some assumptions that are made in the test suite, the group name must also be **farm**. It is ok if you make it a secondary group or the primary group.
-4. Add **exim** as a secondary group to the **farm** user.
+4. Add **exim** as a secondary group to the **farm** user. (You should **NOT** add **farm** as a secondary group to the exim user; this will cause test errors.)
5. Configure sudo to allow user **farm** to elevate to root without a password. Run `visudo` and add:
`farm ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL`
6. Change to the **farm** user.
`mkdir $HOME/buildfarm`
11. Directory permissions must be lax enough for the **exim** user running the test suite to be able to access the files that user farm has checked out. Make the **farm** user's home directory be world readable and world searchable:
`chmod o+rx $HOME`
-12. Test the build process by running `./run_build.pl --test --verbose=2`. If there are build errors, make adjustments, install additional packages, etc, and repeat the test. You can repeat this as many times as you want because test mode does not store the status of the git repo or the status of each stage of the build.
-13. The official process can be kicked off by running `/home/farm/code/run_cron.sh`. This will run the default build configuration and upload the results to the server.
-14. Once that command runs with no complaints, add it to the **farm** user crontab. You can run it at whatever frequency you choose, I suggest 1 hour. If a previous instantiation is still running, the script will detect the lockfile and exit.
+12. Test the configure process by running `./run_build.pl --test --verbose=2 --only-steps=configure`. If there are errors, you'll need to correct them until the process succeeds (ends with OK). You can repeat this as many times as necessary because test mode does not store the status of the git repo or the status of each stage of the build.
+13. Test the build process by running `./run_build.pl --test --verbose=2 --only-steps=configure,make`. If there are build errors, make adjustments, install additional packages, etc, and repeat the test.
+14. Test the test suite by running `./run_build.pl --test --verbose=2 --only-steps=configure,make,test --override range_num_tests='1 2'`. If there are build errors when building the test suite, or runtime errors trying to run the test suite, you may need to install additional packages (you shouldn't though).
+15. If you enabled the documentation building process in the *build-farm.conf*, then you can try to build it with `./run_build.pl --test --verbose=2 --only-steps=configure,build_docs`. For documentation generation to succeed, it will require extra packages to be installed to support xml, xslt, pdf, and a few other things.
+16. If you can get past each of these steps, then your build farm system meets the minimum requirements.
+17. The official process can be kicked off by running `/home/farm/code/run_cron.sh --run-all`. This will run the default build configuration, keep track of the git repository status, and upload the build results to the server.
+18. Once that command runs with no complaints, add it to the **farm** user crontab. You can run it at whatever frequency you choose, I suggest 1 hour. If a previous instantiation is still running, the script will detect the lockfile and exit so as not to step on each other.
## Overview
git://git.exim.org / buildfarm-client-wiki.git / blobdiff