Month: August 2014

I love using Geckoboard. I love using Jenkins. I do have a few issues connecting the two though.

My Jenkins build cluster sits inside my corporate network and while there is a Jenkins plugin for Geckoboard it will only connect to Jenkins instances it can see on the public internet. I haven’t yet found a Geckoboard plugin for Jenkins to push results out through either. One day soon I’ll be annoyed enough to learn some Java and write one but until then I have a hack.

The core configurations of most of my Jenkins jobs runs approximately on these lines:

make deb && scp *deb deb-repo.my.net:/var/www/apt/incoming/

i.e. build a .deb (for Ubuntu) and if successful, copy and queue it for indexing by reprepro on my .deb repository server.

Now in Geckoboard I can configure a 1×1 Custom Text widget for PUSH data and publish data to it like so:

curl https://push.geckoboard.com/v1/send/F639F1AE-2227-11E4-A773-8FE5A58BF7C4 \
-d "{"api_key":"AC738FE5A58BF7C4","data":{"item":[{"text":"packagename.deb","type":0}]}}"

Let’s make it a little more sustainable. In the main Jenkins configuration I set up a global environment variable called GECKO_APIKEY with a value of AC738FE5A58BF7C4. Now the line reads:

curl https://push.geckoboard.com/v1/send/F639F1AE-2227-11E4-A773-8FE5A58BF7C4 \
-d "{"api_key":"$GECKO_APIKEY","data":{"item":[{"text":"packagename.deb","type":0}]}}"

I know I’ll need to change the posted data on failure which most like means duplicating some or all of that line so I’ll extract the widget id too. The job is now configured like:

export WIDGET=F639F1AE-2227-11E4-A773-8FE5A58BF7C4
make deb && scp *deb deb-repo.my.net:/var/www/apt/incoming/
curl https://push.geckoboard.com/v1/send/$WIDGET \
 -d "{"api_key":"$GECKO_APIKEY","data":{"item":[{"text":"packagename.deb","type":0}]}}"

But it’s not yet triggered differently on success or failure, so…

export WIDGET=F639F1AE-2227-11E4-A773-8FE5A58BF7C4
make deb && scp *deb deb-repo.my.net:/var/www/apt/incoming/  && \
curl https://push.geckoboard.com/v1/send/$WIDGET \
 -d "{"api_key":"$GECKO_APIKEY","data":{"item":[{"text":"packagename.deb","type":0}]}}" || \
curl https://push.geckoboard.com/v1/send/$WIDGET \
 -d "{"api_key":"$GECKO_APIKEY","data":{"item":[{"text":"packagename.deb","type":1}]}}"

The duplicate URL and packagename.deb are annoying aren’t they? A quick look at the Jenkins docs reveals $JOB_NAME has what we want.

export WIDGET=F639F1AE-2227-11E4-A773-8FE5A58BF7C4
export GECKO_URL=https://push.geckoboard.com/v1/send/$WIDGET
make deb && scp *deb deb-repo.my.net:/var/www/apt/incoming/  && \
curl $GECKO_URL \
 -d "{"api_key":"$GECKO_APIKEY","data":{"item":[{"text":"$JOB_NAME PASS","type":0}]}}" || \
curl $GECKO_URL \
 -d "{"api_key":"$GECKO_APIKEY","data":{"item":[{"text":"$JOB_NAME FAIL","type":1}]}}"

Not too bad. It even works on Windows without too many modifications – “set” instead of “export”, %VAR% instead of $VAR and a Windows curl binary added to %PATH%.

 

Note: All API keys and Widget Ids have been changed to protect the innocent.