Our current autopkgtest machinery uses Jenkins (a private and a public one) and lots of “rsync state files between hosts”, both of which have reached a state where they fall over far too often. It’s flakey, hard to maintain, and hard to extend with new test execution slaves (e. g. for new architectures, or using different test runners). So I’m looking into what it would take to replace this with something robust, modern, and more lightweight.

In our new Continuous Integration world the preferred technologies are RabbitMQ for doing the job distribution (which is delightfully simple to install and use from Python), and OpenStack’s swift for distributed data storage. We have a properly configured swift in our data center, but for local development and experimentation I really just want a dead simple throw-away VM or container which gives me the swift API. swift is quite a bit more complex, and it took me several hours of reading and exercising various tutorials, debugging connection problems, and reading stackexchange to set it up. But now it’s working, and I condensed the whole setup into a single setup-swift.sh shell script.

You can run this in a standard ubuntu container or VM as root:

sudo apt-get install lxc
sudo lxc-create -n swift -t ubuntu -- -r trusty
sudo lxc-start -n swift
# log in as ubuntu/ubuntu, and wget or scp setup-swift.sh
sudo ./setup-swift.sh

Then get swift’s IP from sudo lxc-ls --fancy, install the swift client locally, and talk to it:

$ sudo apt-get install python-swiftclient
$ swift -A http://10.0.3.134:8080/auth/v1.0 -U testproj:testuser -K testpwd stat

Caveat: Don’t use this for any production machine! It’s configured to maximum insecurity, with static passwords and everything.

I realize this is just poor man’s juju, but juju-local is currently not working for me (I only just analyzed that). There is a charm for swift as well, but I haven’t tried that yet. In any case, it’s dead simple now, and maybe useful for someone else.