October 20, 2023 The update to Inrepoconfig handling will break users if they have symlinks inside .prow/ that point to targets elsewhere in the codebase. See this comment for details.
January 20, 2023 Remove k8s-ci-robot at-mention autoresponse for instances that does not warrant additional explanation in the details section.
August 4, 2022 override plugin will now override checkruns set by GitHub Actions and other CI systems on a PR.
June 8, 2022 deck.rerun_auth_configs can optionally be replaced with deck.default_rerun_auth_configs which supports a new format that is a slice of filters with associated rerun auth configs rather than a map. Currently entries can filter by repo and/or cluster. The old field is still supported and will not be deprecated.
April 6, 2022 Highlight and pin interesting lines. To do this, shift-click on log lines in the buildlog lens. The URL fragment causes the same lines to be highlighted next page load. Additionally, when viewing a GCS log pressing the pin button saves the highlight. The saved highlight automatically displays next page load.
January 24, 2022 It is possible now to define GitHub Apps bots as trusted users to allow automatic tests trigger without relying on /ok-to-test from organization member. Trigger and DCO plugins configuration now support additional field trusted_apps, which contains list of GitHub Apps bot usernames without [bot] suffix.
January 11, 2022 Trigger plugin can now trigger failed github jobs. The feature needs to be enabled in the triggers section of the plugin.yaml config and can be specified per trigger as follows:
```
triggers:
- repos:
  - org/repo
  - org2
  trigger_github_workflows: true
```
August 24, 2021 Postsubmit Prow jobs now support the always_run field. This field interacts with the run_if_changed and skip_if_only_changed fields as follows:
1. (NEW) If the field is explicitly set to always_run: false, then the Postsubmit will not run automatically. The intention is to allow other triggers outside of a GitHub change, such as a Pub/Sub event, to trigger the job. See this issue for the motivation. However if run_if_changed or skip_if_only_changed is also set, then those triggers are determined first; if for whatever reason they cannot be determined, then the job will not run automatically (and wait for another trigger such as a Pub/Sub event as mentioned above).
2. If the field is explicitly set to always_run: true, then the Postsubmit job will always run. Also trying to set run_if_changed or skip_if_only_changed in the same Postsubmit job will result in a config error. This mutual exclusivity matches the configuration behavior of Presubmit jobs, which also disallow combining always_run: true together with run_if_changed or skip_if_only_changed.
3. If always_run is not set (missing from the job config):
  1. If both run_if_changed and skip_if_only_changed are not set: same as old behavior (Postsubmit job will run automatically upon a GitHub change).
  2. If one of run_if_changed or skip_if_only_changed is set: same as old behavior (running will depend on run_if_changed or skip_if_only_changed).
May 14th, 2021: All components that interact with GitHub newly allow client-side throttling customization via --github-hourly-tokens and --github-allowed-burst parameters. A notable exception to this is Tide which has custom throttling logic and does not expose these two new options. Other existing custom options in branchprotector, peribolos, status-reconciler and needs-rebase (--tokens/--hourly-tokens etc.) are deprecated and will be removed in August 2021.
April 12th, 2021 End of grace period for storage bucket validation, additional buckets have to be allowed by adding them to the deck.additional_allowed_buckets list.
March 9th, 2021 Tide batchtesting will now continue to test a given batch even when more PRs became eligible while a test failed. You can disable this by setting tide.prioritize_existing_batches.<org or org/repo>: false in your Prow config.
March 3, 2021 plank.default_decoration_configs can optionally be replaced with plank.default_decoration_config_entries which supports a new format that is a slice of filters with associated decoration configs rather than a map. Currently entries can filter by repo and/or cluster. The old field is still supported and will not be deprecated.
February 23, 2021 New format introduced in plugins.yaml. Repos can be excluded from plugin definition at org level using excluded_repos notation. The previous format will be deprecated in July 2021, see https://github.com/kubernetes/test-infra/issues/20631.
November 2, 2020 Tide is now able to respect checkruns.
September 15, 2020 Added validation to Deck that will restrict artifact requests based on storage buckets. Opt-out by setting deck.skip_storage_path_validation in your Prow config. Buckets specified in job configs (<job>.gcs_configuration.bucket) and plank configs (plank.default_decoration_configs[*].gcs_configuration.bucket) are automatically allowed access. Additional buckets can be allowed by adding them to the deck.additional_allowed_buckets list. (This feature will be enabled by default ~Jan 2021. For now, you will begin to notice violation warnings in your logs.)
August 31th, 2020 Added gcs_browser_prefixes field in spyglass configuration. gcs_browser_prefix will be deprecated in February 2021. You can now specify different values for different repositories. The format should be in org, org/repo or ‘*’ which is the default value.
July 13th, 2020 Configuring job_url_prefix_config with gcs/ prefix is now deprecated. Please configure a job url prefix without the gcs/ storage provider suffix. From now on the storage provider is appended automatically so multiple storage providers can be used for builds of the same repository. For now we still handle the old configuration format, this will be removed in September 2020. To be clear handling of URLs with /view/gcs in Deck is not deprecated.
June 23rd, 2020 An hmac tool was added to automatically reconcile webhooks and hmac tokens for the orgs and repos integrated with your prow instance.
June 8th, 2020 A new informer-based Plank implementation was added. It can be used by deploying the new prow-controller-manager binary. We plan to gradually move all our controllers into that binary, see https://github.com/kubernetes/test-infra/issues/17024
May 31, 2020 ‘–gcs-no-auth’ in Deck is deprecated and not used anymore. We always fall back to an anonymous GCS client now, if all other options fail. This flag will be removed in July 2020.
May 25, 2020 Added --blob-storage-workers and --kubernetes-blob-storage-workers flags to crier. The flags --gcs-workers and --kubernetes-gcs-workers are now deprecated and will be removed in August 2020.
May 13, 2020 Added a decorate_all_jobs option to job configuration that allows to control whether jobs are decorated by default. Individual jobs can use the decorate option to override this setting.
March 25, 2020 Added a report_templates option to the Plank config that allows to specify different report templates for each organization or a specific repository. The report_template option is deprecated and it will be removed on September 2020 which is going to be replaced with the * value in report_templates.
January 03, 2020 Added a pr_status_base_urls option to the Tide config that allows to specify different tide’s URL for each organization or a specific repository. The pr_status_base_url will be deprecated on June 2020 and it will be replaced with the * value in pr_status_base_urls.
November 05, 2019 The config-updater plugin supports update configs on build clusters by using clusters. The fields namespace and additional_namespaces are deprecated.
October 27, 2019 The trusted_org functionality in trigger is being deprecated in favour of being more explicit in the fact that org members or repo collaborators are the trusted users. This option will be removed completely in January 2020.
October 07, 2019 Added a default_decoration_configs option to the Plank config that allows to specify different plank’s default configuration for each organization or a specific repository. default_decoration_config will be deprecated in April 2020 and it will be replaced with the * value in default_decoration_configs.
August 29, 2019 Added a batch_size_limit option to the Tide config that allows the batch size limit to be specified globally, per org, or per repo. Values default to 0 indicating no size limit. A value of -1 disables batches.
July 30, 2019 authorized_users in rerun_auth_config for deck will become github_users.
July 19, 2019 deck will soon remove its default value for --cookie-secret-file. If you set --oauth-url but not --cookie-secret-file, add --cookie-secret-file=/etc/cookie-secret to your deck instance. The default value will be removed at the end of October 2019.
July 2, 2019 prow defaults to report status for both presubmit and postsubmit jobs on GitHub now.
June 17, 2019 It is now possible to configure the channel for the Slack reporter directly on jobs via the .reporter_config.slack.channel config option
May 13, 2019 New plank config pod_running_timeout is added and defaulted to two days to allow plank abort pods stuck in running state.
April 25, 2019 --job-config in peribolos has never been used; it is deprecated and will be removed in July 2019. Remove the flag from any calls to the tool.
April 24, 2019 file_weight_count in blunderbuss is being deprecated in favour of the more current max_request_count functionality. Please ensure your configuration is up to date before the end of May 2019.
March 12, 2019 tide now records a history of its actions and exposes a filterable view of these actions at the /tide-history deck path.
March 9, 2019 prow components now support reading gzipped config files
February 13, 2019 prow (both plank and crier) can set status on the commit for postsubmit jobs on github now! Type of jobs can be reported to github is gated by a config field like
```
github_reporter:
  job_types_to_report:
  - presubmit
  - postsubmit
```
now and default to report for presubmit only. The default will change in April to include postsubmit jobs as well You can also add skip_report: true to your post-submit jobs to skip reporting if you enable postsubmit reporting on.
January 15, 2019 approve now considers self-approval and github review state by default. Configure with require_self_approval and ignore_review_state. Temporarily revert to old defaults with use_deprecated_2018_implicit_self_approve_default_migrate_before_july_2019 and use_deprecated_2018_review_acts_as_approve_default_migrate_before_july_2019.
January 12, 2019 blunderbluss plugin now provides a new command, /auto-cc, that triggers automatic review requests.
January 7, 2019 implicit_self_approve will become require_self_approval in the second half of this year.
January 7, 2019 review_acts_as_approve will become ignore_review_state in the second half of this year.
October 10, 2018 tide now supports the -repo:foo/bar tag in queries via the excludedRepos YAML field.
October 3, 2018 welcome now supports a configurable message on a per-org, or per-repo basis. Please note that this includes a config schema change that will break previous deployments of this plugin.
August 22, 2018 spyglass is a pluggable viewing framework for artifacts produced by Prowjobs. See a demo here!
July 13, 2018 blunderbluss plugin will now support required_reviewers in OWNERS file to specify a person or github team to be cc’d on every PR that touches the corresponding part of the code.
June 25, 2018 updateconfig plugin will now support update/remove keys from a glob match.
June 05, 2018 blunderbuss plugin may now suggest approvers in addition to reviewers. Use exclude_approvers: true to revert to previous behavior.
April 10, 2018 cla plugin now supports /check-cla command to force rechecking of the CLA status.
February 1, 2018 updateconfig will now update any configmap on merge
November 14, 2017 jenkins-operator:0.58 exposes prometheus metrics.
November 8, 2017 horologium:0.14 prow periodic job now support cron triggers. See https://godoc.org/gopkg.in/robfig/cron.v2 for doc to the cron library we are using.

Breaking changes

Breaking changes to external APIs (labels, GitHub interactions, configuration or deployment) will be documented in this section. Prow is in a pre-release state and no claims of backwards compatibility are made for any external API. Note: versions specified in these announcements may not include bug fixes made in more recent versions so it is recommended that the most recent versions are used when updating deployments.

August 24th, 2022 Deck by default validating storage buckets, can still opt out by setting deck.skip_storage_path_validation: true in your Prow config. Buckets specified in job configs (<job>.gcs_configuration.bucket) and plank configs (plank.default_decoration_configs[*].gcs_configuration.bucket) are automatically allowed access. Additional buckets can be allowed by adding them to the deck.additional_allowed_buckets list.
May 27th, 2022 Crier flags --gcs-workers and --kubernetes-gcs-workers are removed in favor of --blob-storage-workers and --kubernetes-blob-storage-workers.
May 27th, 2022 The owners_dir_blacklist field in prow config is removed in favor of owners_dir_denylist.
February 22nd, 2022 Since prow version v20220222-acb5731b85, the entrypoint container in a prow job will run as --copy-mode-only, instead of /bin/cp /entrypoint /tools/entrypoint. Entrypoint images before the mentioned version will not work with --copy-mode-only, and entrypoint image since the mentioned version will not work with /bin/cp /entrypoint /tools/entrypoint. In another word, prow versions newer than or equal to v20220222-acb5731b85 will stop working with pod utilities versions older than v20220222-acb5731b85. If your prow instance is bumped by prow/cmd/generic-autobumper then you should not be affected.
February 22nd, 2022 Since prow version v20220222-acb5731b85, prow images pushed to gcr.io/k8s-prow will be built with ko, and the binaries will be placed under /ko-app/, for example /robots/commenter is pushed to gcr.io/k8s-prow/commenter, the commenter binary is located at /ko-app/commenter in the image, prow jobs that use this image will update to command: - /ko-app/commenter to make it work, alternatively, the command could also be command: - commenter as /ko-app is added to $PATH env var in the image.
February 22nd, 2022 Since prow version v20220222-acb5731b85, static files in deck image will be stored under /var/run/ko/ directory.
October 27th, 2021 The checkconfig flag --prow-yaml-repo-path no longer defaults to /home/prow/go/src/github.com/<< prow-yaml-repo-name >>/.prow.yaml when --prow-yaml-repo-name is set. The defaulting has instead been replaced with the assumption that the Prow YAML file/directory can be found in the current working directory if --prow-yaml-repo-path is not specified. If you are running checkconfig from a decorated ProwJobs as is typical, then this is already the case.
September 16th, 2021 The ProwJob CRD manifest has been extended to specify a schema. Unfortunately, this results in a huge manifest which in turn makes the standard kubectl apply fail, as the last-applied annotation it generates exceeds the maximum annotation size. If you are using Kubernetes 1.18 or newer, you can add the --server-side=true argument to work around this. If not, you can use a schemaless manifest
September 15th, 2021 autobump removed, please use generic-autobumper instead, see example config
April 16th, 2021 Flagutil remove default value for --github-token-path.
April 15th, 2021 Sinker requires –dry-run=false (default is true) to function correctly in production.
April 14th, 2021 Deck remove default value for --cookie-secret-file.
April 12th, 2021 Horologium now uses a cached client, which requires it to have watch permissions for Prowjobs on top of the already-required list and create.
April 11th, 2021 The plank binary has been removed. Please use the Prow Controller Manager instead, which provides a more modern implementation of the same functionality.
April 1st, 2021 The owners_dir_blacklist field in prow config has been deprecated in favor of owners_dir_denylist. The support of owners_dir_blacklist will be stopped in October 2021.
April 1st, 2021 The labels_blacklist field in verify-owners plugin config is deprecated in favor of labels_denylist. The support for labels_blacklist shall be stopped in October 2021.
January 24th, 2021 Planks Pod pending and Pod scheduling timeout defaults where changed from 24h each to the more reasonable 10 minutes/5 minutes, respectively.
January 1, 2021 Support for whitelist and branch_whitelist fields in Slack merge warning configuration is discontinued. You can use exempt_users and exempt_branches fields instead.
November 24, 2020 The requiresig plugin has been removed in favor of the require-matching-label plugin which provides equivalent functionality (example plugin config)
November 14, 2020 The whitelist and branch_whitelist fields in Slack merge warning were deprecated on August 22, 2020 in favor of the new exempt_users and exempt_branches fields. The support for these fields shall be stopped in January 2021.
November 11th, 2020 The prow-controller-manager and sinker now require RBAC to be set up to manage their leader lock in the coordination.k8s.io group. See here
November, 2020 The deprecated namespace and additional_namespaces properties have been removed from the config updater plugin for more details.
November, 2020 The blacklist flag in status reconciler has been deprecated in favor of denylist. The support of blacklist will be stopped in February 2021.
October, 2020 The plank binary has been deprecated in favor of the more modern implementation in the prow-controller-manager that provides the same functionality. Check out its README or check out its deployment and rbac manifest. The plank binary will be removed in February, 2021.
September 14th, 2020 Sinker now requires LIST and WATCH permissions for pods
September 2, 2020 The already deprecated namespace and additional_namespaces settings in the config updater will be removed in October, 2020
August 28, 2020 tide now ignores archived repositories in queries.
August 28, 2020 The Clusters format and associated --build-cluster flag has been removed.
August 24, 2020 The deprecated reporting functionality has been removed from Plank, use crier with --github-workers=1 instead Use a .kube/config with the --kubeconfig flag to specify credentials for external build clusters.
August 22, 2020 The whitelist and branch_whitelist fields in Slack merge warning are deprecated in favor of the new exempt_users and exempt_branches fields.
July 17, 2020 Slack reporter will no longer report all states of a Prow job if it has Channel specified on the Prow job config. Instead, it will report the job_states_to_report configured in the Prow job or in the Prow core config if the former does not exist.
May 18, 2020 expiry field has been replaced with created_at in the HMAC secret.
April 24, 2020 Horologium now defaults to --dry-run=true
April 23, 2020 Explicitly setting --config-path is now required.
April 23, 2020 Update the autobump image to at least v20200422-8c8546d74 before June 2020.
April 23, 2020 Deleted deprecated default_decoration_config.
April 22, 2020 Deleted the file_weight_count blunderbuss option.
April 16, 2020 The docs-no-retest prow plugin has been deleted. The plugin was deprecated in January 2020.
April 14, 2020 GitHub reporting via plank is deprecated, set –github-workers=1 on crier before July 2020.
March 27, 2020 The deprecated allow_cancellations option has been removed from Plank and the Jenkins operator.
March 19, 2020 The rerun_auth_config config field has been deprecated in favor of the new rerun_auth_configs field which allows configuration on a global, organization or repo level. rerun_auth_config will be removed in July 2020.
November 21, 2019 The boskos metrics component replaced the existing prometheus metrics with a single, label-qualified metric. Metrics are now served at /metrics on port 9090. This actually happened August 5th, but is being documented now. Details: https://github.com/kubernetes/test-infra/pull/13767
November 18, 2019 The mkbuild-cluster command-line utility and build-cluster format is deprecated and will be removed in May 2020. Use gencred and the kubeconfig format as an alternative.
November 14, 2019 The slack_reporter config field has been deprecated in favor of the new slack_reporter_configs field which allows configuration on a global, organization or repo level. slack_reporter will be removed in May 2020.
November 7, 2019 The plank.allow_cancellations and jenkins_operators.allow_cancellations settings are deprecated and will be removed and set to always true in March 2020.
October 7, 2019 Prow will drop support for the deprecated knative-builds in November 2019.
September 24, 2019 Sending an http GET request to the /hook endpoint now returns a 405 (Method Not Allowed) instead of a 200 (OK).
September 8, 2019 The deprecated job_url_prefix option has been removed from Plank.
May 2, 2019 All components exposing Prometheus metrics will now either push them to the Prometheus PushGateway, if configured, or serve them locally on port 9090 at /metrics, if not configured (the default).
April 26, 2019 blunderbuss, approve, and other plugins that read OWNERS now treat owners_dir_blacklist as a list of regular expressions matched against the entire (repository-relative) directory path of the OWNERS file rather than as a list of strings matched exactly against the basename only of the directory containing the OWNERS file.
April 2, 2019 hook, deck, horologium, tide, plank and sinker will no longer provide a default value for the --config-path flag. It is required to explicitly provide --config-path when upgrading to a new version of these components that were previously relying on the default --config-path=/etc/config/config.yaml.
March 29, 2019 Custom logos should be provided as full paths in the configuration under deck.branding.logos and will not implicitly be assumed to be under the static assets directory.
February 26, 2019 The job_url_prefix option from plank has been deprecated in favor of the new job_url_prefix_config option which allows configuration on a global, organization or repo level. job_url_prefix will be removed in September 2019.
February 13, 2019 horologium and sinker deployments will soon require --dry-run=false in production, please set this before March 15. At that time flag will default to –dry-run=true instead of –dry-run=false.
February 1, 2019 Now that hook and tide will no longer post “Skipped” statuses for jobs that do not need to run, it is not possible to require those statuses with branch protection. Therefore, it is necessary to run the branchprotector from at least version 510db59 before upgrading tide to that version.
February 1, 2019 horologium and sinker now support the --dry-run flag, so you must pass --dry-run=false to keep the previous behavior (see Feb 13 update).
January 31, 2019 sub no longer supports the --masterurl flag for connecting to the infrastructure cluster. Use --kubeconfig with --context for this.
January 31, 2019 crier no longer supports the --masterurl flag for connecting to the infrastructure cluster. Use --kubeconfig with --context for this.
January 27, 2019 Jobs that do not run will no longer post “Skipped” statuses.
January 27, 2019 Jobs that do not run always will no longer be required by branch protection as they will not always produce a status. They will continue to be required for merge by tide if they are configured as required.
January 27, 2019 All support for run_after_success jobs has been removed. Configuration of these jobs will continue to parse but will ignore the field.
January 27, 2019 hook will now correctly honor the run_always field on Gerrit presubmits. Previously, if this field was unset it would have defaulted to true; now, it will correctly default to false.
January 22, 2019 sinker prefers .kube/config instead of the custom Clusters file to specify credentials for external build clusters. The flag name has changed from --build-cluster to --kubeconfig. Migrate before June 2019.
November 29, 2018 plank will no longer default jobs with decorate: true to have automountServiceAccountToken: false in their PodSpec if unset, if the job explicitly sets serviceAccountName
November 26, 2018 job names must now match ^[A-Za-z0-9-._]+$. Jobs that did not match this before were allowed but did not provide a good user experience.
November 15, 2018 the hook service account now requires RBAC privileges to create ConfigMaps to support new functionality in the updateconfig plugin.
November 9, 2018 Prow gerrit client label/annotations now have a prow.k8s.io/ namespace prefix, if you have a gerrit deployment, please bump both cmd/gerrit and cmd/crier.
November 8, 2018 plank now defaults jobs with decorate: true to have automountServiceAccountToken: false in their PodSpec if unset. Jobs that used the default service account should explicitly set this field to maintain functionality.
October 16, 2018 Prow tls-cert management has been migrated from kube-lego to cert-manager.
October 12, 2018 Removed deprecated buildId environment variable from prow jobs. Use BUILD_ID.
October 3, 2018 -github-token-file replaced with -github-token-path for consistency with branchprotector and peribolos which were already using -github-token-path. -github-token-file will continue to work through the remainder of 2018, but it will be removed in early 2019. The following commands are affected: cherrypicker, hook, jenkins-operator, needs-rebase, phony, plank, refresh, and tide.
October 1, 2018 bazel is the one official way to build container images. Please use prow/bump.sh and/or bazel run //prow:release-push

Sep 27, 2018 If you are setting explicit decorate configs, the format has changed from

- name: job-foo
  decorate: true
  timeout: 1

- name: job-foo
  decorate: true
  decoration_config:
    timeout: 1

September 24, 2018 the splice component has been deleted following the deletion of mungegithub.

July 9, 2018 milestone format has changed from

milestone:
 maintainers_id: <some_team_id>
 maintainers_team: <some_team_name>

to repo_milestone

repo_milestone:
 <some_repo_name>:
   maintainers_id: <some_team_id>
   maintainers_team: <some_team_name>

July 2, 2018 the trigger plugin will now trust PRs from repo collaborators. Use only_org_members: true in the trigger config to temporarily disable this behavior.
June 14, 2018 the updateconfig plugin will only add data to your ConfigMaps using the basename of the updated file, instead of using that and also duplicating the data using the name of the ConfigMap as a key
June 1, 2018 all unquoted boolean fields in config.yaml that were unmarshall into type string now need to be quoted to avoid unmarshalling error.
May 9, 2018 deck logs for jobs run as Pods will now return logs for the "test" container only.

April 2, 2018 updateconfig format has been changed from

path/to/some/other/thing: configName

path/to/some/other/thing:
  Name: configName
  # If unspecified, Namespace default to the value of ProwJobNamespace.
  Namespace: myNamespace

March 15, 2018 jenkins_operator is removed from the config in favor of jenkins_operators.
March 1, 2018 MilestoneStatus has been removed from the plugins Configuration in favor of the Milestone which is shared between two plugins: 1) milestonestatus and 2) milestone. The milestonestatus plugin now uses the Milestone object to get the maintainers team ID
February 27, 2018 jenkins-operator does not use $BUILD_ID as a fallback to $PROW_JOB_ID anymore.
February 15, 2018 jenkins-operator can now accept the --tot-url flag and will use the connection to tot to vend build identifiers as plank does, giving control over where in GCS artifacts land to Prow and away from Jenkins. Furthermore, the $BUILD_ID variable in Jenkins jobs will now correctly point to the build identifier vended by tot and a new variable, $PROW_JOB_ID, points to the identifier used to link ProwJobs to Jenkins builds. $PROW_JOB_ID fallbacks to $BUILD_ID for backwards-compatibility, ie. to not break in-flight jobs during the time of the jenkins-operator update.
February 1, 2018 The config_updater section in plugins.yaml now uses a maps object instead of config_file, plugin_file strings. Please switch over before July.
November 30, 2017 If you use tide, you’ll need to switch your query format and bump all prow component versions to reflect the changes in #5754.
November 14, 2017 horologium:0.17 fixes cron job not being scheduled.
November 10, 2017 If you want to use cron feature in prow, you need to bump to: hook:0.181, sinker:0.23, deck:0.62, splice:0.32, horologium:0.15 plank:0.60, jenkins-operator:0.57 and tide:0.12 to avoid error spamming from the config parser.
November 7, 2017 plank:0.56 fixes bug introduced in plank:0.53 that affects controllers using an empty kubernetes selector.
November 7, 2017 jenkins-operator:0.51 provides jobs with the $BUILD_ID variable as well as the $buildId variable. The latter is deprecated and will be removed in a future version.
November 6, 2017 plank:0.55 provides Pods with the $BUILD_ID variable as well as the $BUILD_NUMBER variable. The latter is deprecated and will be removed in a future version.
November 3, 2017 Added EmptyDir volume type. To update to hook:0.176+ or horologium:0.11+ the following components must have the associated minimum versions: deck:0.58+, plank:0.54+, jenkins-operator:0.50+.
November 2, 2017 plank:0.53 changes the type label key to prow.k8s.io/type and the job annotation key to prow.k8s.io/job added in pods.
October 14, 2017 deck:0:53+ needs to be updated in conjunction with jenkins-operator:0:48+ since Jenkins logs are now exposed from the operator and deck needs to use the external_agent_logs option in order to redirect requests to the location jenkins-operator exposes logs.
October 13, 2017 hook:0.174, plank:0.50, and jenkins-operator:0.47 drop the deprecated github-bot-name flag.
October 2, 2017 hook:0.171: The label plugin was split into three plugins (label, sigmention, milestonestatus). Breaking changes:
- The configuration key for the milestone maintainer team’s ID has been changed. Previously the team ID was stored in the plugins config at key label»milestone_maintainers_id. Now that the milestone status labels are handled in the milestonestatus plugin instead of the label plugin, the team ID is stored at key milestonestatus»maintainers_id.
- The sigmention and milestonestatus plugins must be enabled on any repos that require them since their functionality is no longer included in the label plugin.
September 3, 2017 sinker:0.17 now deletes pods labeled by plank:0.42 in order to avoid cleaning up unrelated pods that happen to be found in the same namespace prow runs pods. If you run other pods in the same namespace, you will have to manually delete or label the prow-owned pods, otherwise you can bulk-label all of them with the following command and let sinker collect them normally:
```
kubectl label pods --all -n pod_namespace created-by-prow=true
```
September 1, 2017 deck:0.44 and jenkins-operator:0.41 controllers no longer provide a default value for the --jenkins-token-file flag. Cluster administrators should provide --jenkins-token-file=/etc/jenkins/jenkins explicitly when upgrading to a new version of these components if they were previously relying on the default. For more context, please see this pull request.
August 29, 2017 Configuration specific to plugins is now held in the plugins ConfigMap and serialized in this repo in the plugins.yaml file. Cluster administrators upgrading to hook:0.148 or newer should move plugin configuration from the main ConfigMap. For more context, please see this pull request.

Project updates

October 28, 2022 Documentation migration: existing Markdown files in k/t-i have been migrated over to https://docs.prow.k8s.io/docs/legacy-snapshot. The old locations now have “tombstones” to redirect to the new location. See https://github.com/kubernetes/test-infra/pull/27818 for details.

2 - Overview

A brief guide about Prow and its ecosystem

Prow is a Kubernetes based CI/CD system. Jobs can be triggered by various types of events and report their status to many different services. In addition to job execution, Prow provides GitHub automation in the form of policy enforcement, chat-ops via /foo style commands, and automatic PR merging.

See the GoDoc for library docs. Please note that these libraries are intended for use by prow only, and we do not make any attempt to preserve backwards compatibility.

For a brief overview of how Prow runs jobs take a look at “Life of a Prow Job”.

To see common Prow usage and interactions flow, see the pull request interactions sequence diagram.

Functions and Features

Job execution for testing, batch processing, artifact publishing.
- GitHub events are used to trigger post-PR-merge (postsubmit) jobs and on-PR-update (presubmit) jobs.
- Support for multiple execution platforms and source code review sites.
Pluggable GitHub bot automation that implements /foo style commands and enforces configured policies/processes.
GitHub merge automation with batch testing logic.
Front end for viewing jobs, merge queue status, dynamically generated help information, and more.
Automatic deployment of source control based config.
Automatic GitHub org/repo administration configured in source control.
Designed for multi-org scale with dozens of repositories. (The Kubernetes Prow instance uses only 1 GitHub bot token!)
High availability as benefit of running on Kubernetes. (replication, load balancing, rolling updates…)
JSON structured logs.
Prometheus metrics.

Documentation

Getting started

With your own Prow deployment: “Deploying Prow”
With developing for Prow: “Developing and Contributing to Prow”
As a job author: ProwJobs

More details

Tests

The stability of prow is heavily relying on unit tests and integration tests.

Unit tests are co-located with prow source code
Integration tests utilizes kind with hermetic integration tests. See instructions for adding new integration tests for more details

Useful Talks

KubeCon 2020 EU virtual

Going Beyond CI/CD with Prow

KubeCon 2018 EU

KubeCon 2018 China

SIG Testing Intro

KubeCon 2018 Seattle

Misc

Deploy Your Own Kubernetes Prow

Prow in the wild

Prow is used by the following organizations and projects:

Kubernetes
- This includes kubernetes, kubernetes-client, kubernetes-csi, and kubernetes-sigs.
OpenShift
- This includes openshift, openshift-s2i, operator-framework, and some repos in containers and heketi.
Istio
Knative
Jetstack
Kyma
Metal³
Prometheus
Caicloud
Kubeflow
Azure AKS Engine
tensorflow/minigo
Daisy (Google Compute Image Tools)
KubeEdge (Kubernetes Native Edge Computing Framework)
Volcano (Kubernetes Native Batch System)
Loodse
Feast
Falco
TiDB
Amazon EKS Distro and Amazon EKS Anywhere
KubeSphere
OpenYurt
KubeVirt
AWS Controllers for Kubernetes
Gardener

Jenkins X uses Prow as part of Serverless Jenkins.

Contact us

If you need to contact the maintainers of Prow you have a few options:

Open an issue in the kubernetes-sigs/prow repo.
Reach out to the #prow channel of the Kubernetes Slack.
Contact one of the code owners in OWNERS or in a more specifically scoped OWNERS file.

Bots home

@k8s-ci-robot lives here and is the face of the Kubernetes Prow instance. Here is a command list for interacting with @k8s-ci-robot and other Prow bots.

2.1 - Architecture

Prow is made up of a collection of microservices (aka “Prow components”) that work together in a service cluster, leveraging one or more build clusters to schedule Prow Jobs (or just “jobs”).

Prow in a Nutshell

Prow creates jobs based on various types of events, such as:

GitHub events (e.g., a new PR is created, or is merged, or a person comments “/retest” on a PR),
Pub/Sub messages,
time (these are created by Horologium and are called periodic jobs), and
retesting (triggered by Tide).

Jobs are created inside the Service Cluster as Kubernetes Custom Resources. The Prow Controller Manager takes triggered jobs and schedules them into a build cluster, where they run as Kubernetes pods. Crier then reports the results back to GitHub.

flowchart TD

    classDef yellow fill:#ff0
    classDef cyan fill:#0ff
    classDef pink fill:#f99

    subgraph Service Cluster["<span style='font-size: 40px;'><b>Service Cluster</b></span>"]
        Deck:::cyan
        Prowjobs:::yellow
        Crier:::cyan
        Tide:::cyan
        Horologium:::cyan
        Sinker:::cyan
        PCM[Prow Controller Manager]:::cyan
        Hook:::cyan
            subgraph Hook
                WebhookHandler["Webhook Handler"]
                PluginCat(["'cat' plugin"])
                PluginTrigger(["'trigger' plugin"])
            end
    end

    subgraph Build Cluster[<b>Build Cluster</b>]
        Pods[(Pods)]:::yellow
    end

    style Legend fill:#fff,stroke:#000,stroke-width:4px
    subgraph Legend["<span style='font-size: 20px;'><b>LEGEND</b></span>"]
        direction LR
        k8sResource[Kubernetes Resource]:::yellow
        prowComponent[Prow Component]:::cyan
        hookPlugin([Hook Plugin])
        Other
    end

    Prowjobs <-.-> Deck <-----> |Serve| prow.k8s.io
    GitHub ==> |Webhooks| WebhookHandler
    WebhookHandler --> |/meow| PluginCat
    WebhookHandler --> |/retest| PluginTrigger
    Prowjobs <-.-> Tide --> |Retest and Merge| GitHub
    Horologium ---> |Create| Prowjobs
    PluginCat --> |Comment| GitHub
    PluginTrigger --> |Create| Prowjobs
    Sinker ---> |Garbage collect| Prowjobs
    Sinker --> |Garbage collect| Pods
    PCM -.-> |List and update| Prowjobs
    PCM ---> |Report| Prowjobs
    PCM ==> |Create and Query| Pods
    Prowjobs <-.-> |Inform| Crier --> |Report| GitHub

Notes

Note that Prow can also work with Gerrit, albeit with less features. Specifically, neither Tide nor Hook work with Gerrit yet.

3 - Components

Prow Images

This directory includes a sub directory for every Prow component and is where all binary and container images are built. You can find the main packages here. For details about building the binaries and images see “Building, Testing, and Updating Prow”.

Cluster Components

Prow has a microservice architecture implemented as a collection of container images that run as Kubernetes deployments. A brief description of each service component is provided here.

Core Components

crier (doc, code) reports on ProwJob status changes. Can be configured to report to gerrit, github, pubsub, slack, etc.
deck (doc, code) presents a nice view of recent jobs, command and plugin help information, the current status and history of merge automation, and a dashboard for PR authors.
hook (doc, code) is the most important piece. It is a stateless server that listens for GitHub webhooks and dispatches them to the appropriate plugins. Hook’s plugins are used to trigger jobs, implement ‘slash’ commands, post to Slack, and more. See the plugins doc and code directory for more information on plugins.
horologium (doc, code) triggers periodic jobs when necessary.
prow-controller-manager (doc, code) manages the job execution and lifecycle for jobs that run in k8s pods. It currently acts as a replacement for plank
sinker (doc, code) cleans up old jobs and pods.

Merge Automation

tide (doc, code) manages retesting and merging PRs once they meet the configured merge criteria. See its README for more information.

Optional Components

branchprotector (doc, code) configures github branch protection according to a specified policy
exporter (doc, code) exposes metrics about ProwJobs not directly related to a specific Prow component
gcsupload (doc, code)
gerrit (doc, code) is a Prow-gerrit adapter for handling CI on gerrit workflows
hmac (doc, code) updates HMAC tokens, GitHub webhooks and HMAC secrets for the orgs/repos specified in the Prow config file
jenkins-operator (doc, code) is the controller that manages jobs that run on Jenkins. We moved away from using this component in favor of running all jobs on Kubernetes.
tot (doc, code) vends sequential build numbers. Tot is only necessary for integration with automation that expects sequential build numbers. If Tot is not used, Prow automatically generates build numbers that are monotonically increasing, but not sequential.
status-reconciler (doc, code) ensures changes to blocking presubmits in Prow configuration does not cause in-flight GitHub PRs to get stuck
sub (doc, code) listen to Cloud Pub/Sub notification to trigger Prow Jobs.

CLI Tools

checkconfig (doc, code) loads and verifies the configuration, useful as a pre-submit.
config-bootstrapper (doc, code) bootstraps a configuration that would be incrementally updated by the updateconfig Prow plugin
generic-autobumper (doc, code) automates image version upgrades (e.g. for a Prow deployment) by opening a PR with images changed to their latest version according to a config file.
invitations-accepter (doc, code) approves all pending GitHub repository invitations
mkpj (doc, code) creates ProwJobs using Prow configuration.
mkpod (doc, code) creates Pods from ProwJobs.
peribolos (doc, code) manages GitHub org, team and membership settings according to a config file. Used by kubernetes/org
phony (doc, code) sends fake webhooks for testing hook and plugins.

Pod Utilities

These are small tools that are automatically added to ProwJob pods for jobs that request pod decoration. They are used to transparently provide source code cloning and upload of metadata, logs, and job artifacts to persistent storage. See their README for more information.

clonerefs (doc, code)
initupload (doc, code)
entrypoint (doc, code)
sidecar (doc, code)

Base Images

The container images in images are used as base images for Prow components.

TODO: undocumented

admission (doc, code)
grandmatriarch (doc, code)
pipeline (doc, code)
tackle (doc, code)

Deprecated

cm2kc (doc, code) is a CLI tool used to convert a clustermap file to a kubeconfig file. Deprecated because we have moved away from clustermaps; you should use gencred to generate a kubeconfig file directly.
phaino (doc) runs an approximation of a ProwJob on your local workstation

3.1 - Core Components

3.1.1 - Crier

Crier reports your prowjobs on their status changes.

Usage / How to enable existing available reporters

For any reporter you want to use, you need to mount your prow configs and specify --config-path and job-config-path flag as most of other prow controllers do.

Gerrit reporter

You can enable gerrit reporter in crier by specifying --gerrit-workers=n flag.

Similar to the gerrit adapter, you’ll need to specify --gerrit-projects for your gerrit projects, and also --cookiefile for the gerrit auth token (leave it unset for anonymous).

Gerrit reporter will send an aggregated summary message, when all gerrit adapter scheduled prowjobs with the same report label finish on a revision. It will also attach a report url so people can find logs of the job.

The reporter will also cast a +1/-1 vote on the prow.k8s.io/gerrit-report-label label of your prowjob, or by default it will vote on CodeReview label. Where +1 means all jobs on the patshset pass and -1 means one or more jobs failed on the patchset.

Pubsub reporter

You can enable pubsub reporter in crier by specifying --pubsub-workers=n flag.

You need to specify following labels in order for pubsub reporter to report your prowjob:

Label	Description
`"prow.k8s.io/pubsub.project"`	Your gcp project where pubsub channel lives
`"prow.k8s.io/pubsub.topic"`	The topic of your pubsub message
`"prow.k8s.io/pubsub.runID"`	A user assigned job id. It’s tied to the prowjob, serves as a name tag and help user to differentiate results in multiple pubsub messages

The service account used by crier will need to have pubsub.topics.publish permission in the project where pubsub channel lives, e.g. by assigning the roles/pubsub.publisher IAM role

Pubsub reporter will report whenever prowjob has a state transition.

You can check the reported result by list the pubsub topic.

GitHub reporter

You can enable github reporter in crier by specifying --github-workers=N flag (N>0).

You also need to mount a github oauth token by specifying --github-token-path flag, which defaults to /etc/github/oauth.

If you have a ghproxy deployed, also remember to point --github-endpoint to your ghproxy to avoid token throttle.

The actual report logic is in the github report library for your reference.

Slack reporter

NOTE: if enabling the slack reporter for the first time, Crier will message to the Slack channel for all ProwJobs matching the configured filtering criteria.

You can enable the Slack reporter in crier by specifying the --slack-workers=n and --slack-token-file=path-to-tokenfile flags.

The --slack-token-file flag takes a path to a file containing a Slack OAuth Access Token.

The OAuth Access Token can be obtained as follows:

Navigate to: https://api.slack.com/apps.
Click Create New App.
Provide an App Name (e.g. Prow Slack Reporter) and Development Slack Workspace (e.g. Kubernetes).
Click Permissions.
Add the chat:write.public scope using the Scopes / Bot Token Scopes dropdown and Save Changes.
Click Install App to Workspace
Click Allow to authorize the Oauth scopes.
Copy the OAuth Access Token.

Once the access token is obtained, you can create a secret in the cluster using that value:

kubectl create secret generic slack-token --from-literal=token=< access token >

Furthermore, to make this token available to Crier, mount the slack-token secret using a volume and set the --slack-token-file flag in the deployment spec.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: crier
  labels:
    app: crier
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: crier
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: crier
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: crier
        image: gcr.io/k8s-prow/crier:v20200205-656133e91
        args:
        - --slack-workers=1
        - --slack-token-file=/etc/slack/token
        - --config-path=/etc/config/config.yaml
        - --dry-run=false
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /etc/config
          name: config
          readOnly: true
        - name: slack
          mountPath: /etc/slack
          readOnly: true
      volumes:
      - name: slack
        secret:
          secretName: slack-token
      - name: config
        configMap:
          name: config

Additionally, in order for it to work with Prow you must add the following to your config.yaml:

NOTE: slack_reporter_configs is a map of org, org/repo, or * (i.e. catch-all wildcard) to a set of slack reporter configs.

slack_reporter_configs:

  # Wildcard (i.e. catch-all) slack config
  "*":
    # default: None
    job_types_to_report:
      - presubmit
      - postsubmit
    # default: None
    job_states_to_report:
      - failure
      - error
    # required
    channel: my-slack-channel
    # The template shown below is the default
    report_template: "Job {{.Spec.Job}} of type {{.Spec.Type}} ended with state {{.Status.State}}. <{{.Status.URL}}|View logs>"

  # "org/repo" slack config
  istio/proxy:
    job_types_to_report:
      - presubmit
    job_states_to_report:
      - error
    channel: istio-proxy-channel

  # "org" slack config
  istio:
    job_types_to_report:
      - periodic
    job_states_to_report:
      - failure
    channel: istio-channel

The channel, job_states_to_report and report_template can be overridden at the ProwJob level via the reporter_config.slack field:

postsubmits:
  some-org/some-repo:
    - name: example-job
      decorate: true
      reporter_config:
        slack:
          channel: 'override-channel-name'
          job_states_to_report:
            - success
          report_template: "Overridden template for job {{.Spec.Job}}"
      spec:
        containers:
          - image: alpine
            command:
              - echo

To silence notifications at the ProwJob level you can pass an empty slice to reporter_config.slack.job_states_to_report: postsubmits:

  some-org/some-repo:
    - name: example-job
      decorate: true
      reporter_config:
        slack:
          job_states_to_report: []
      spec:
        containers:
          - image: alpine
            command:
              - echo

Implementation details

Crier supports multiple reporters, each reporter will become a crier controller. Controllers will get prowjob change notifications from a shared informer, and you can specify --num-workers to change parallelism.

If you are interested in how client-go works under the hood, the details are explained in this doc

Adding a new reporter

Each crier controller takes in a reporter.

Each reporter will implement the following interface:

type reportClient interface {
 Report(pj *v1.ProwJob) error
 GetName() string
 ShouldReport(pj *v1.ProwJob) bool
}

GetName will return the name of your reporter, the name will be used as a key when we store previous reported state for each prowjob.

ShouldReport will return if a prowjob should be handled by current reporter.

Report is the actual report logic happens. Return nil means report is successful, and the reported state will be saved in the prowjob. Return an actual error if report fails, crier will re-add the prowjob key to the shared cache and retry up to 5 times.

You can add a reporter that implements the above interface, and add a flag to turn it on/off in crier.

Migration from plank for github report

Both plank and crier will call into the github report lib when a prowjob needs to be reported, so as a user you only want to make one of them to report :-)

To disable GitHub reporting in Plank, add the --skip-report=true flag to the Plank deployment.

Before migrating, be sure plank is setting the PrevReportStates field by describing a finished presubmit prowjob. Plank started to set this field after commit 2118178, if not, you want to upgrade your plank to a version includes this commit before moving forward.

you can check this entry by:

$ kubectl get prowjobs -o jsonpath='{range .items[*]}{.metadata.name}{"\t"}{.status.prev_report_states.github-reporter}{"\n"}'
...
fafec9e1-3af2-11e9-ad1a-0a580a6c0d12	failure
fb027a97-3af2-11e9-ad1a-0a580a6c0d12	success
fb0499d3-3af2-11e9-ad1a-0a580a6c0d12	failure
fb05935f-3b2b-11e9-ad1a-0a580a6c0d12	success
fb05e1f1-3af2-11e9-ad1a-0a580a6c0d12	error
fb06c55c-3af2-11e9-ad1a-0a580a6c0d12	success
fb09e7d8-3abb-11e9-816a-0a580a6c0f7f	success

You want to add a crier deployment, similar to ours config/prow/cluster/crier_deployment.yaml, flags need to be specified:

point config-path and --job-config-path to your prow config and job configs accordingly.
Set --github-worker to be number of parallel github reporting threads you need
Point --github-endpoint to ghproxy, if you have set that for plank
Bind github oauth token as a secret and set --github-token-path if you’ve have that set for plank.

In your plank deployment, you can

Remove the --github-endpoint flags
Remove the github oauth secret, and --github-token-path flag if set
Flip on --skip-report, so plank will skip the reporting logic

Both change should be deployed at the same time, if have an order preference, deploy crier first since report twice should just be a no-op.

We will send out an announcement when we cleaning up the report dependency from plank in later 2019.

3.1.2 - Deck

Shows what jobs are running or have recently run in prow

Running Deck locally

Deck can be run locally by executing ./cmd/deck/runlocal. The scripts starts Deck via Bazel using:

pre-generated data (extracted from a running Prow instance)
the local config.yaml
the local static files, template files and lenses

Open your browser and go to: http://localhost:8080

Debugging via Intellij / VSCode

This section describes how to debug Deck locally by running it inside VSCode or Intellij.

# Prepare assets
make build-tarball PROW_IMAGE=cmd/deck
mkdir -p /tmp/deck
tar -xvf ./_bin/deck.tar -C /tmp/deck 
cd /tmp/deck
# Expand all layers
for tar in *.tar.gz; do tar -xvf $tar; done

# Start Deck via go or in your IDE with the following arguments:
--config-path=./config/prow/config.yaml
--job-config-path=./config/jobs
--hook-url=http://prow.k8s.io
--spyglass
--template-files-location=/tmp/deck/var/run/ko/template
--static-files-location=/tmp/deck/var/run/ko/static
--spyglass-files-location=/tmp/deck/var/run/ko/lenses

Rerun Prow Job via Prow UI

Rerun prow job can be done by visiting prow UI, locate prow job and rerun job by clicking on the ↻ button, selecting a configuration option, and then clicking Rerun button. For prow on github, the permission is controlled by github membership, and configured as part of deck configuration, see rerun_auth_configs for k8s prow.

See example below: Example

Rerunning can also be done on Spyglass: Example

This is also available for non github prow if the frontend is secured and allow_anyone is set to true for the job.

Abort Prow Job via Prow UI

Aborting a prow job can be done by visiting the prow UI, locate the prow job and abort the job by clicking on the ✕ button, and then clicking Confirm button. For prow on github, the permission is controlled by github membership, and configured as part of deck configuration, see rerun_auth_configs for k8s prow. Note, the abort functionality uses the same field as rerun for permissions.

See example below: Example

Aborting can also be done on Spyglass: Example

This is also available for non github prow if the frontend is secured and allow_anyone is set to true for the job.

3.1.2.1 - How to setup GitHub Oauth

This document helps configure GitHub Oauth, which is required for PR Status and for the rerun button on Prow Status. If OAuth is configured, Prow will perform GitHub actions on behalf of the authenticated users. This is necessary to fetch information about pull requests for the PR Status page and to authenticate users when checking if they have permission to rerun jobs via the rerun button on Prow Status.

Set up secrets

The following steps will show you how to set up an OAuth app.

Create your GitHub Oauth application

https://developer.github.com/apps/building-oauth-apps/creating-an-oauth-app/

Make sure to create a GitHub Oauth App and not a regular GitHub App.

The callback url should be:

<PROW_BASE_URL>/github-login/redirect
Create a secret file for GitHub OAuth that has the following content. The information can be found in the GitHub OAuth developer settings:
```
client_id: <APP_CLIENT_ID>
client_secret: <APP_CLIENT_SECRET>
redirect_url: <PROW_BASE_URL>/github-login/redirect
final_redirect_url: <PROW_BASE_URL>/pr
```
If Prow is expected to work with private repositories, add
```
scopes:
- repo
```
Create another secret file for the cookie store. This cookie secret will also be used for CSRF protection. The file should contain a random 32-byte length base64 key. For example, you can use openssl to generate the key
```
openssl rand -out cookie.txt -base64 32
```
Use kubectl, which should already point to your Prow cluster, to create secrets using the command:

kubectl create secret generic github-oauth-config --from-file=secret=<PATH_TO_YOUR_GITHUB_SECRET>

kubectl create secret generic cookie --from-file=secret=<PATH_TO_YOUR_COOKIE_KEY_SECRET>
To use the secrets, you can either:
- Mount secrets to your deck volume:
  
  Open test-infra/config/prow/cluster/deck_deployment.yaml. Under volumes token, add:
```
- name: oauth-config
  secret:
      secretName: github-oauth-config
- name: cookie-secret
  secret:
      secretName: cookie
```
  Under volumeMounts token, add:
```
- name: oauth-config
  mountPath: /etc/githuboauth
  readOnly: true
- name: cookie-secret
  mountPath: /etc/cookie
  readOnly: true
```
- Add the following flags to deck:
```
- --github-oauth-config-file=/etc/githuboauth/secret
- --oauth-url=/github-login
- --cookie-secret=/etc/cookie/secret
```
  Note that the --oauth-url should eventually be changed to a boolean as described in #13804.
- You can also set your own path to the cookie secret using the --cookie-secret flag.
- To prevent deck from making mutating GitHub API calls, pass in the --dry-run flag.

Using A GitHub bot

The rerun button can be configured so that certain GitHub teams are allowed to trigger certain jobs from the frontend. In order to make API calls to determine whether a user is on a given team, deck needs to use the access token of an org member.

If not, you can create a new GitHub account, make it an org member, and set up a personal access token here.

Then create the access token secret:

kubectl create secret generic oauth-token --from-file=secret=<PATH_TO_ACCESS_TOKEN>

Add the following to volumes and volumeMounts:

volumeMounts:
- name: oauth-token
  mountPath: /etc/github
  readOnly: true
volumes:
- name: oauth-token
  secret:
      secretName: oauth-token

Pass the file path to deck as a flag:

--github-token-path=/etc/github/oauth

You can optionally use ghproxy to reduce token usage.

Run PR Status endpoint locally

Firstly, you will need a GitHub OAuth app. Please visit step 1 - 3 above.

When testing locally, pass the path to your secrets to deck using the --github-oauth-config-file and --cookie-secret flags.

Run the command:

go build . && ./deck --config-path=../../../config/prow/config.yaml --github-oauth-config-file=<PATH_TO_YOUR_GITHUB_OAUTH_SECRET> --cookie-secret=<PATH_TO_YOUR_COOKIE_SECRET> --oauth-url=/pr

Using a test cluster

If hosting your test instance on http instead of https, you will need to use the --allow-insecure flag in deck.

3.1.2.2 - CSRF attacks

In Deck, we make a number of POST requests that require user authentication. These requests are susceptible to cross site request forgery (CSRF) attacks, in which a malicious actor tricks an already authenticated user into submitting a form to one of these endpoints and performing one of these protected actions on their behalf.

Protection

If --cookie-secret is 32 or more bytes long, CSRF protection is automatically enabled. If --rerun-creates-job is specified, CSRF protection is required, and accordingly, --cookie-secret must be 32 bytes long.

We protect against CSRF attacks using the gorilla CSRF library, implemented in #13323. Broadly, this protection works by ensuring that any POST request originates from our site, rather than from an outside link. We do so by requiring that every POST request made to Deck includes a secret token either in the request header or in the form itself as a hidden input.

We cryptographically generate the CSRF token using the --cookie-secret and a user session value and include it as a header in every POST request made from Deck. If you are adding a new POST request, you must include the CSRF token as described in the gorilla documentation.

The gorilla library expects a 32-byte CSRF token. If --cookie-secret is sufficiently long, direct job reruns will be enabled via the /rerun endpoint. Otherwise, if --cookie-secret is less than 32 bytes and --rerun-creates-job is enabled, Deck will refuse to start. Longer values will work but should be truncated.

By default, gorilla CSRF requires that all POST requests are made over HTTPS. If developing locally over HTTP, you must specify --allow-insecure to Deck, which will configure both gorilla CSRF and GitHub oauth to allow HTTP requests.

CSRF can also be executed by tricking a user into making a state-mutating GET request. All state-mutating requests must therefore be POST requests, as gorilla CSRF does not secure GET requests.

3.1.3 - Hook

This is a placeholder page. Some contents needs to be filled.

3.1.4 - Horologium

This is a placeholder page. Some contents needs to be filled.

3.1.5 - Prow-Controller-Manager

prow-controller-manager manages the job execution and lifecycle for jobs running in k8s.

It currently acts as a replacement for Plank.

It is intended to eventually replace other components, such as Sinker and Crier. See the tracking issue #17024 for details.

Advantages

Eventbased rather than cronbased, hence reacting much faster to changes in prowjobs or pods
Per-Prowjob retrying, meaning genuinely broken prowjobs will not be retried forever and transient errors will be retried much quicker
Uses a cache for the build cluster rather than doing a LIST every 30 seconds, reducing the load on the build clusters api server

Exclusion with other components

This is mutually exclusive with only Plank. Only one of them may have more than zero replicas at the same time.

Usage

$ go run ./cmd/prow-controller-manager --help

Configuration

3.1.6 - Sinker

This is a placeholder page. Some contents needs to be filled.

3.1.7 - Tide

Tide is a Prow component for managing a pool of GitHub PRs that match a given set of criteria. It will automatically retest PRs that meet the criteria (“tide comes in”) and automatically merge them when they have up-to-date passing test results (“tide goes out”).

Open Issues

Documentation

Features

Automatically runs batch tests and merges multiple PRs together whenever possible.
Ensures that PRs are tested against the most recent base branch commit before they are allowed to merge.
Maintains a GitHub status context that indicates if each PR is in a pool or what requirements are missing.
Supports blocking merge to individual branches or whole repos using specifically labelled GitHub issues.
Exposes Prometheus metrics.
Supports repos that have ‘optional’ status contexts that shouldn’t be required for merge.
Serves live data about current pools and a history of actions which can be consumed by Deck to populate the Tide dashboard, the PR dashboard, and the Tide history page.
Scales efficiently so that a single instance with a single bot token can provide merge automation to dozens of orgs and repos with unique merge criteria. Every distinct ‘org/repo:branch’ combination defines a disjoint merge pool so that merges only affect other PRs in the same branch.
Provides configurable merge modes (‘merge’, ‘squash’, or ‘rebase’).

History

Tide was created in 2017 by @spxtr to replace mungegithub’s Submit Queue. It was designed to manage a large number of repositories across organizations without using many API rate limit tokens by identifying mergeable PRs with GitHub search queries fulfilled by GitHub’s v4 GraphQL API.

Flowchart

    graph TD;
        subgraph github[GitHub]
            subgraph org/repo/branch
                head-ref[HEAD ref];
                pullrequest[Pull Request];
                status-context[Status Context];
            end
        end

        subgraph prow-cluster
            prowjobs[Prowjobs];
            config.yaml;
        end

        subgraph tide-workflow
            Tide;
            pools;
            divided-pools;
            pools-->|dividePool|divided-pools;
            filtered-pools;
            subgraph syncSubpool
                pool-i;
                pool-n;
                pool-n1;
                accumulated-batch-prowjobs-->|filter out <br> incorrect refs <br> no longer meet merge requirement|valid-batches;
                valid-batches-->accumulated-batch-success;
                valid-batches-->accumulated-batch-pending;
                
                status-context-->|fake prowjob from context|filtered-prowjobs;
                filtered-prowjobs-->|accumulate|map_context_best-result;
                map_context_best-result-->map_pr_overall-results;
                map_pr_overall-results-->accumulated-success;
                map_pr_overall-results-->accumulated-pending;
                map_pr_overall-results-->accumulated-stale;
                
                subgraph all-accumulated-pools
                    accumulated-batch-success;
                    accumulated-batch-pending;
                    accumulated-success;
                    accumulated-pending;
                    accumulated-stale;
                end

                accumulated-batch-success-..->accumulated-batch-success-exist{Exist};
                accumulated-batch-pending-..->accumulated-batch-pending-exist{Exist};
                accumulated-success-..->accumulated-success-exist{Exist};
                accumulated-pending-..->accumulated-pending-exist{Exist};
                accumulated-stale-..->accumulated-stale-exist{Exist};
                pool-i-..->require-presubmits{Require Presubmits};
                accumulated-batch-success-exist-->|yes|merge-batch[Merge batch];
                merge-batch-->|Merge Pullrequests|pullrequest;
                accumulated-batch-success-exist-->|no|accumulated-batch-pending-exist;
                accumulated-batch-pending-exist-->|no|accumulated-success-exist;
                accumulated-success-exist-->|yes|merge-single[Merge Single];
                merge-single-->|Merge Pullrequests|pullrequest;
                require-presubmits-->|no|wait;
                accumulated-success-exist-->|no|require-presubmits;
                require-presubmits-->|yes|accumulated-pending-exist;
                accumulated-pending-exist-->|no|can-trigger-batch{Can Trigger New Batch};
                can-trigger-batch-->|yes|trigger-batch[Trigger new batch];
                can-trigger-batch-->|no|accumulated-stale-exist;
                accumulated-stale-exist-->|yes|trigger-highest-pr[Trigger Jobs on Highest Priority PR];
                accumulated-stale-exist-->|no|wait;
            end
        end

        Tide-->pools[Pools - grouped PRs, prow jobs by org/repo/branch];
        pullrequest-->pools;
        divided-pools-->|filter out prs <br> failed prow jobs <br> pending non prow checks <br> merge conflict <br> invalid merge method|filtered-pools;
        head-ref-->divided-pools;
        prowjobs-->divided-pools;
        config.yaml-->divided-pools;
        filtered-pools-->pool-i;
        filtered-pools-->pool-n;
        filtered-pools-->pool-n1[pool ...];
        pool-i-->|report tide status|status-context;
        pool-i-->|accumulateBatch|accumulated-batch-prowjobs;
        pool-i-->|accumulateSerial|filtered-prowjobs;



        classDef plain fill:#ddd,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:4px,color:#000;
        classDef k8s fill:#326ce5,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:4px,color:#fff;
        classDef github fill:#fff,stroke:#bbb,stroke-width:2px,color:#326ce5;
        classDef pools-def fill:#00ffff,stroke:#bbb,stroke-width:2px,color:#326ce5;
        classDef decision fill:#ffff00,stroke:#bbb,stroke-width:2px,color:#326ce5;
        classDef outcome fill:#00cc66,stroke:#bbb,stroke-width:2px,color:#326ce5;
        class prowjobs,config.yaml k8s;
        class Tide plain;
        class status-context,head-ref,pullrequest github;
        class accumulated-batch-success,accumulated-batch-pending,accumulated-success,accumulated-pending,accumulated-stale pools-def;
        class accumulated-batch-success-exist,accumulated-batch-pending-exist,accumulated-success-exist,accumulated-pending-exist,accumulated-stale-exist,can-trigger-batch,require-presubmits decision;
        class trigger-highest-pr,trigger-batch,merge-single,merge-batch,wait outcome;

3.1.7.1 - Configuring Tide

Configuration of Tide is located under the config/prow/config.yaml file. All configuration for merge behavior and criteria belongs in the tide yaml struct, but it may be necessary to also configure presubmits for Tide to run against PRs (see ‘Configuring Presubmit Jobs’ below).

This document will describe the fields of the tide configuration and how to populate them, but you can also check out the GoDocs for the most up to date configuration specification.

To deploy Tide for your organization or repository, please see how to get started with prow.

General configuration

The following configuration fields are available:

sync_period: The field specifies how often Tide will sync jobs with GitHub. Defaults to 1m.
status_update_period: The field specifies how often Tide will update GitHub status contexts. Defaults to the value of sync_period.
queries: List of queries (described below).
merge_method: A key/value pair of an org/repo as the key and merge method to override the default method of merge as value. Valid options are squash, rebase, and merge. Defaults to merge.
merge_commit_template: A mapping from org/repo or org to a set of Go templates to use when creating the title and body of merge commits. Go templates are evaluated with a PullRequest (see PullRequest type). This field and map keys are optional.
target_urls: A mapping from “*”, , or <org/repo> to the URL for the tide status contexts. The most specific key that matches will be used.
pr_status_base_urls: A mapping from “*”, , or <org/repo> to the base URL for the PR status page. If specified, this URL is used to construct a link that will be used for the tide status context. It is mutually exclusive with the target_urls field.
max_goroutines: The maximum number of goroutines spawned inside the component to handle org/repo:branch pools. Defaults to 20. Needs to be a positive number.
blocker_label: The label used to identify issues which block merges to repository branches.
squash_label: The label used to ask Tide to use the squash method when merging the labeled PR.
rebase_label: The label used to ask Tide to use the rebase method when merging the labeled PR.
merge_label: The label used to ask Tide to use the merge method when merging the labeled PR.

Merge Blocker Issues

Tide supports temporary holds on merging into branches via the blocker_label configuration option. In order to use this option, set the blocker_label configuration option for the Tide deployment. Then, when blocking merges is required, if an open issue is found with the label it will block merges to all branches for the repo. In order to scope the branches which are blocked, add a branch:name token to the issue title. These tokens can be repeated to select multiple branches and the tokens also support quoting, so branch:"name" will block the name branch just as branch:name would.

Queries

The queries field specifies a list of queries. Each query corresponds to a set of open PRs as candidates for merging. It can consist of the following dictionary of fields:

orgs: List of queried organizations.
repos: List of queried repositories.
excludedRepos: List of ignored repositories.
labels: List of labels any given PR must posses.
missingLabels: List of labels any given PR must not posses.
excludedBranches: List of branches that get excluded when querying the repos.
includedBranches: List of branches that get included when querying the repos.
author: The author of the PR.
reviewApprovedRequired: If set, each PR in the query must have at least one approved GitHub pull request review present for merge. Defaults to false.

Under the hood, a query constructed from the fields follows rules described in https://help.github.com/articles/searching-issues-and-pull-requests/. Therefore every query is just a structured definition of a standard GitHub search query which can be used to list mergeable PRs. The field to search token correspondence is based on the following mapping:

orgs -> org:kubernetes
repos -> repo:kubernetes/test-infra
labels -> label:lgtm
missingLabels -> -label:do-not-merge
excludedBranches -> -base:dev
includedBranches -> base:master
author -> author:batman
reviewApprovedRequired -> review:approved

Every PR that needs to be rebased or is failing required statuses is filtered from the pool before processing

Context Policy Options

A PR will be merged when all checks are passing. With this option you can customize which contexts are required or optional.

By default, required and optional contexts will be derived from Prow Job Config. This allows to find if required checks are missing from the GitHub combined status.

If branch-protection config is defined, it can be used to know which test needs be passing to merge a PR.

When branch protection is not used, required and optional contexts can be defined globally, or at the org, repo or branch level.

If we want to skip unknown checks (ie checks that are not defined in Prow Config), we can set skip-unknown-contexts to true. This option can be set globally or per org, repo and branch.

Important: If this option is not set and no prow jobs are defined tide will trust the GitHub combined status and will assume that all checks are required (except for it’s own tide status).

Example

tide:
  merge_method:
    kubeflow/community: squash

  target_url: https://prow.k8s.io/tide

  queries:
  - repos:
    - kubeflow/community
    - kubeflow/examples
    labels:
    - lgtm
    - approved
    missingLabels:
    - do-not-merge
    - do-not-merge/hold
    - do-not-merge/work-in-progress
    - needs-ok-to-test
    - needs-rebase

  context_options:
    # Use branch-protection options from this file to define required and optional contexts.
    # this is convenient if you are using branchprotector to configure branch protection rules
    # as tide will use the same rules as will be added by the branch protector
    from-branch-protection: true
    # Specify how to handle contexts that are detected on a PR but not explicitly listed in required-contexts,
    # optional-contexts, or required-if-present-contexts.  If true, they are treated as optional and do not
    # block a merge.  If false or not present, they are treated as required and will block a merge.
    skip-unknown-contexts: true
    orgs:
      org:
        required-contexts:
        - "check-required-for-all-repos"
        repos:
          repo:
            required-contexts:
             - "check-required-for-all-branches"
            branches:
              branch:
                from-branch-protection: false
                required-contexts:
                - "required_test"
                optional-contexts:
                - "optional_test"
                required-if-present-contexts:
                - "conditional_test"

Explanation: The component starts periodically querying all PRs in github.com/kubeflow/community and github.com/kubeflow/examples repositories that have lgtm and approved labels set and do not have do-not-merge, do-not-merge/hold, do-not-merge/work-in-progress, needs-ok-to-test and needs-rebase labels set. All PRs that conform to the criteria are processed and merged. The processing itself can include running jobs (e.g. tests) to verify the PRs are good to go. All commits in PRs from github.com/kubeflow/community repository are squashed before merging.

For a full list of properties of queries, please refer to prow-config-documented.yaml.

Persistent Storage of Action History

Tide records a history of the actions it takes (namely triggering tests and merging). This history is stored in memory, but can be loaded from GCS and periodically flushed in order to persist across pod restarts. Persisting action history to GCS is strictly optional, but is nice to have if the Tide instance is restarted frequently or if users want to view older history.

Both the --history-uri and --gcs-credentials-file flags must be specified to Tide to persist history to GCS. The GCS credentials file should be a GCP service account key file for a service account that has permission to read and write the history GCS object. The history URI is the GCS object path at which the history data is stored. It should not be publicly readable if any repos are sensitive and must be a GCS URI like gs://bucket/path/to/object.

Example

Configuring Presubmit Jobs

Before a PR is merged, Tide ensures that all jobs configured as required in the presubmits part of the config.yaml file are passing against the latest base branch commit, rerunning the jobs if necessary. No job is required to be configured in which case it’s enough if a PR meets all GitHub search criteria.

Semantic of individual fields of the presubmits is described in ProwJobs.

3.1.7.2 - Maintainer's Guide to Tide

Best practices

Don’t let humans (or other bots) merge especially if tests have a long duration. Every merge invalidates currently running tests for that pool.
Try to limit the total number of queries that you configure. Individual queries can cover many repos and include many criteria without using additional API tokens, but separate queries each require additional API tokens.
Ensure that merge requirements configured in GitHub match the merge requirements configured for Tide. If the requirements differ, Tide may try to merge a PR that GitHub considers unmergeable.
If you are using the lgtm plugin and requiring the lgtm label for merge, don’t make queries exclude the needs-ok-to-test label. The lgtm plugin triggers one round of testing when applied to an untrusted PR and removes the lgtm label if the PR changes so it indicates to Tide that the current version of the PR is considered trusted and can be retested safely.
Do not enable the “Require branches to be up to date before merging” GitHub setting for repos managed by Tide. This requires all PRs to be rebased before merge so that PRs are always simple fast-forwards. This is a simplistic way to ensure that PRs are tested against the most recent base branch commit, but Tide already provides this guarantee through a more sophisticated mechanism that does not force PR authors to rebase their PR whenever another PR merges first. Enabling this GH setting may cause unexpected Tide behavior, provides absolutely no benefit over Tide’s natural behavior, and forces PR author’s to needlessly rebase their PRs. Don’t use it on Tide managed repos.

Expected behavior that might seem strange

Any merge to a pool kicks all other PRs in the pool back into Queued for retest. This is because Tide requires PRs to be tested against the most recent base branch commit in order to be merged. When a merge occurs, the base branch updates so any existing or in-progress tests can no longer be used to qualify PRs for merge. All remaining PRs in the pool must be retested.
Waiting to merge a successful PR because a batch is pending. This is because Tide prioritizes batches over individual PRs and the previous point tells us that merging the individual PR would invalidate the pending batch. In this case Tide will wait for the batch to complete and will merge the individual PR only if the batch fails. If the batch succeeds, the batch is merged.
If the merge requirements for a pool change it may be necessary to “poke” or “bump” PRs to trigger an update on the PRs so that Tide will resync the status context. Alternatively, Tide can be restarted to resync all statuses.
Tide may merge a PR without retesting if the existing test results are already against the latest base branch commit.
It is possible for tide status contexts on PRs to temporarily differ from the Tide dashboard or Tide’s behavior. This is because status contexts are updated asynchronously from the main Tide sync loop and have a separate rate limit and loop period.

Troubleshooting

If Prow’s PR dashboard indicates that a PR is ready to merge and it appears to meet all merge requirements, but the PR is being ignored by Tide, you may have encountered a rare bug with GitHub’s search indexing. TLDR: If this is the problem, then any update to the PR (e.g. adding a comment) will make the PR visible to Tide again after a short delay. The longer explanation is that when GitHub’s background jobs for search indexing PRs fail, the search index becomes corrupted and the search API will have some incorrect belief about the affected PR, e.g. that it is missing a required label or still has a forbidden one. This causes the search query Tide uses to identify the mergeable PRs to incorrectly omit the PR. Since the same search engine is used by both the API and GitHub’s front end, you can confirm that the affected PR is not included in the query for mergeable PRs by using the appropriate “GitHub search link” from the expandable “Merge Requirements” section on the Tide status page. You can actually determine which particular index is corrupted by incrementally tweaking the query to remove requirements until the PR is included. Any update to the PR causes GitHub to kick off a new search indexing job in the background. Once it completes, the corrupted index should be fixed and Tide will be able to see the PR again in query results, allowing Tide to resume processing the PR. It appears any update to the PR is sufficient to trigger reindexing so we typically just leave a comment. Slack thread about an example of this.

Other resources

Configuring Tide

3.1.7.3 - PR Author's Guide to Tide

If you just want to figure out how to get your PR to merge this is the document for you!

Sources of Information

The tide status context at the bottom of your PR. The status either indicates that your PR is in the merge pool or explains why it is not in the merge pool. The ‘Details’ link will take you to either the Tide or PR dashboard.
The PR dashboard at “<deck-url>/pr” where <deck-url> is something like “https://prow.k8s.io”. This dashboard shows a card for each of your PRs. Each card shows the current test results for the PR and the difference between the PR state and the merge criteria. K8s PR dashboard
The Tide dashboard at “<deck-url>/tide”. This dashboard shows the state of every merge pool so that you can see what Tide is currently doing and what position your PR has in the retest queue. K8s Tide dashboard

Get your PR merged by asking these questions

“Is my PR in the merge pool?”

If the tide status at the bottom of your PR is successful (green) it is in the merge pool. If it is pending (yellow) it is not in the merge pool.

“Why is my PR not in the merge pool?”

First, if you just made a change to the PR, give Tide a minute or two to react. Tide syncs periodically (1m period default) so you shouldn’t expect to see immediate reactions.

To determine why your PR is not in the merge pool you have a couple options.

The tide status context at the bottom of your PR will describe at least one of the merge criteria that is not being met. The status has limited space for text so only a few failing criteria can typically be listed. To see all merge criteria that are not being met check out the PR dashboard.
The PR dashboard shows the difference between your PR’s state and the merge criteria so that you can easily see all criteria that are not being met and address them in any order or in parallel.

“My PR is in the merge pool, what now?”

Once your PR is in the merge pool it is queued for merge and will be automatically retested before merge if necessary. So typically your work is done! The one exception is if your PR fails a retest. This will cause the PR to be removed from the merge pool until it is fixed and is passing all the required tests again.

If you are eager for your PR to merge you can view all the PRs in the pool on the Tide dashboard to see where your PR is in the queue. Because we give older PRs (lower numbers) priority, it is possible for a PR’s position in the queue to increase.

Note: Batches of PRs are given priority over individual PRs so even if your PR is in the pool and has up-to-date tests it won’t merge while a batch is running because merging would update the base branch making the batch jobs stale before they complete. Similarly, whenever any other PR in the pool is merged, existing test results for your PR become stale and a retest becomes necessary before merge. However, your PR remains in the pool and will be automatically retested so this doesn’t require any action from you.

3.2 - Optional Components

3.2.1 - Branchprotector

branchprotector configures github branch protection according to a specified policy.

Policy configuration

Extend the primary prow config.yaml document to include a top-level branch-protection key that looks like the following:


branch-protection:
  orgs:
    kubernetes:
      repos:
        test-infra:
          # Protect all branches in kubernetes/test-infra
          protect: true
          # Always allow the org's oncall-team to push
          restrictions:
            teams: ["oncall-team"]
          # Ensure that the extra-process-followed github status context passes.
          # In addition, adds any required prow jobs (aka always_run: true)
          required_status_checks:
            contexts: ["extra-process-followed"]

presubmits:
  kubernetes/test-infra:
  - name: fancy-job-name
    context: fancy-job-name
    always_run: true
    spec:  # podspec that runs job

This config will:

Enable protection for every branch in the kubernetes/test-infra repo.
Require extra-process-followed and fancy-job-name status contexts to pass before allowing a merge
- Although it will always allow oncall-team to merge, even if required contexts fail.
- Note that fancy-job-name is pulled in automatically from the presubmits config for the repo, if one exists.

Updating

Send PR with config.yaml changes
Merge PR
Done!

Make changes to the policy by modifying config.yaml in your favorite text editor and then send out a PR. When the PR merges prow pushes the updated config . The branchprotector applies the new policies the next time it runs (within 24hrs).

Advanced configuration

Fields

See branch_protection.go and GitHub’s protection api for a complete list of fields allowed inside branch-protection and their meanings. The format is:

branch-protection:
  # default policy here
  orgs:
    foo:
      # this is the foo org policy
      protect: true  # enable protection
      enforce_admins: true  # rules apply to admins
      required_linear_history: true  # enforces a linear commit Git history
      allow_force_pushes: true  # permits force pushes to the protected branch
      allow_deletions: true  # allows deletion of the protected branch
      required_pull_request_reviews:
        dismiss_stale_reviews: false # automatically dismiss old reviews
        dismissal_restrictions: # allow review dismissals
          users:
          - her
          - him
          teams:
          - them
          - those
        require_code_owner_reviews: true  # require a code owner approval
        required_approving_review_count: 1 # number of approvals
      required_status_checks:
        strict: false # require pr branch to be up to date
        contexts: # checks which must be green to merge
        - foo
        - bar
      restrictions: # restrict who can push to the repo
        apps:
        - github-prow-app
        users:
        - her
        - him
        teams:
        - them
        - those

Scope

It is possible to define a policy at the branch-protection, org, repo or branch level. For example:

branch-protection:
  # Protect unless overridden
  protect: true
  # If protected, always require the cla status context
  required_status_checks:
    contexts: ["cla"]
  orgs:
    unprotected-org:
      # Disable protection unless overridden (overrides parent setting of true)
      protect: false
      repos:
        protected-repo:
          protect: true
          # Inherit protect-by-default config from parent
          # If protected, always require the tested status context
          required_status_checks:
            contexts: ["tested"]
          branches:
            secure:
              # Protect the secure branch (overrides inhereted parent setting of false)
              protect: true
              # Require the foo status context
              required_status_checks:
                contexts: ["foo"]
    different-org:
      # Inherits protect-by-default: true setting from above

The general rule for how to compute child values is:

If the child value is null or missing, inherit the parent value.
Otherwise:
- List values (like contexts), create a union of the parent and child lists.
- For bool/int values (like protect), the child value replaces the parent value.

So in the example above:

The secure branch in unprotected-org/protected-repo
- enables protection (set a branch level)
- requires foo tested cla status contexts (the latter two are appended by ancestors)
All other branches in unprotected-org/protected-repo
- disable protection (inherited from org level)
All branches in all other repos in unprotected-org
- disable protection (set at org level)
All branches in all repos in different-org
- Enable protection (inherited from branch-protection level)
- Require the cla context to be green to merge (appended by parent)

Developer docs

Run unit tests

go test ./cmd/branchprotector

Run locally

go run ./cmd/branchprotector --help, which will tell you about the current flags.

Do a dry run (which will not make any changes to github) with something like the following command:

go run ./cmd/branchprotector \
  --config-path=/path/to/config.yaml \
  --github-token-path=/path/to/my-github-token

This will say how the binary will actually change github if you add a --confirm flag.

Deploy local changes to dev cluster

Run things like the following:

# Build image locally and push it to <YOUR_REGISTRY>
make push-single-image PROW_IMAGE=cmd/branchprotector REGISTRY=<YOUR_REGISTRY>

This will build an image with your local changes, and push it to <YOUR_REGISTRY>.

Or, if you just want to build an image but not to push, run the following:

# Build image locally
make build-single-image PROW_IMAGE=cmd/branchprotector

This will build an image with your local changes, without pushing it to anywhere.

Deploy cronjob to production

branchprotector image is automatically built as part of prow, see “How to update the cluster” for more details.

Branchprotector runs as a prow periodic job, for example ci-test-infra-branchprotector.

3.2.2 - Exporter

The prow-exporter exposes metrics about prow jobs while the metrics are not directly related to a specific prow-component.

Metrics

Metric name	Metric type	Labels/tags
prow_job_labels	Gauge	`job_name`=<prow_job-name> `job_namespace`=<prow_job-namespace> `job_agent`=<prow_job-agent> `label_PROW_JOB_LABEL_KEY`=<PROW_JOB_LABEL_VALUE>
prow_job_annotations	Gauge	`job_name`=<prow_job-name> `job_namespace`=<prow_job-namespace> `job_agent`=<prow_job-agent> `annotation_PROW_JOB_ANNOTATION_KEY`=<PROW_JOB_ANNOTATION_VALUE>
prow_job_runtime_seconds	Histogram	`job_name`=<prow_job-name> `job_namespace`=<prow_job-namespace> `type`=<prow_job-type> `last_state`=<last-state> `state`=<state> `org`=<org> `repo`=<repo> `base_ref`=<base_ref>

For example, the metric prow_job_labels is similar to kube_pod_labels defined in kubernetes/kube-state-metrics. A typical usage of prow_job_labels is to join it with other metrics using a Prometheus matching operator.

Note that job_name is .spec.job instead of .metadata.name as taken in kube_pod_labels. The gauge value is always 1 because we have another metric prowjobs for the number jobs by name. The metric here shows only the existence of such a job with the label set in the cluster.

3.2.3 - gcsupload

gcsupload uploads artifacts to cloud storage at a path resolved from the job configuration.

gcsupload can be configured by either passing in flags or by specifying a full set of options as JSON in the $GCSUPLOAD_OPTIONS environment variable, which has the following form:

{
    "bucket": "kubernetes-jenkins",
    "sub_dir": "",
    "items": [
        "/logs/artifacts/"
    ],
    "path_strategy": "legacy",
    "default_org": "kubernetes",
    "default_repo": "kubernetes",
    "gcs_credentials_file": "/secrets/gcs/service-account.json",
    "dry_run": "false"
}

In addition to this configuration for the tool, the $JOB_SPEC environment variable should be present to provide the contents of the Prow downward API for jobs. This data is used to resolve the exact location in GCS to which artifacts and logs will be pushed.

The path strategy field can be one of "legacy", "single", and "explicit". This field determines how the organization and repository of the code under test is encoded into the GCS path for the test artifacts:

Strategy	Encoding
`"legacy"`	`""` for the default org and repo, `"org"` for non-default repos in the default org, `"org_repo"` for repos in other orgs.
`"single"`	`""` for the default org and repo, `"org_repo"` for all other repos.
`"explicit"`	`"org_repo"` for all repos.

For historical reasons, the "legacy" or "single" strategies may already be in use for some; however, for new deployments it is strongly advised to use the "explicit" strategy.

3.2.4 - Gerrit

Gerrit is a Prow-gerrit adapter for handling CI on gerrit workflows. It can poll gerrit changes from multiple gerrit instances, and trigger presubmits on Prow upon new patchsets on Gerrit changes, and postsubmits when Gerrit changes are merged.

Deployment Usage

When deploy the gerrit component, you need to specify --config-path to your prow config, and optionally --job-config-path to your prowjob config if you have split them up.

Set --gerrit-projects to the gerrit projects you want to poll against.

Example: If you want prow to interact with gerrit project foo and bar on instance gerrit-1.googlesource.com and also project baz on instance gerrit-2.googlesource.com, then you can set:

--gerrit-projects=gerrit-1.googlesource.com=foo,bar
--gerrit-projects=gerrit-2.googlesource.com=baz

--cookiefile allows you to specify a git https cookie file to interact with your gerrit instances, leave it empty for anonymous access to gerrit API.

--last-sync-fallback should point to a persistent volume that saves your last poll to gerrit.

Underlying infra

Also take a look at gerrit related packages for implementation details.

You might also want to deploy Crier which reports job results back to gerrit.

3.2.5 - HMAC

hmac is a tool to update the HMAC token, GitHub webhooks and HMAC secret for the orgs/repos as per the managed_webhooks configuration changes in the Prow config file.

Prerequisites

To run this tool, you’ll need:

A github account that has admin permission to the orgs/repos.
A personal access token for the github account. Note the token must be granted admin:repo_hook and admin:org_hook scopes.
Permissions to read&write the hmac secret in the Prow cluster.

How to run this tool

There are two ways to run this tool:

Run it on local:

go run ./cmd/hmac \
  --config-path=/path/to/prow/config \
  --github-token-path=/path/to/oauth/secret \
  --kubeconfig=/path/to/kubeconfig \
  --kubeconfig-context=[context of the cluster to connect] \
  --hmac-token-secret-name=[hmac secret name in Prow cluster] \
  --hmac-token-key=[key of the hmac tokens in the secret] \
  --hook-url http://an.ip.addr.ess/hook \
  --dryrun=true  # Remove it to actually update hmac tokens and webhooks

Run it as a Prow job:

The recommended way to run this tool would be running it as a postsubmit job. One example Prow job configured for k8s Prow can be found here.

How it works

Given a new managed_webhooks configuration in the Prow core config file, the tool can reconcile the current state of HMAC tokens, secrets and webhooks to meet the new configuration.

Configuration example

Below is a typical example for the managed_webhooks configuration:

managed_webhooks:
  # Whether this tool should respect the legacy global token.
  # This has to be true if any of the managed repo/org is using the legacy global token that is manually created.   
  respect_legacy_global_token: true
  # Controls whether org/repo invitation for prow bot should be automatically
  # accepted or not. Only admin level invitations related to orgs and repos
  # in the managed_webhooks config will be accepted and all other invitations
  # will be left pending.
  auto_accept_invitation: true
  # Config for orgs and repos that have been onboarded to this Prow instance.
  org_repo_config:
    qux:
      token_created_after: 2017-10-02T15:00:00Z
    foo/bar:
      token_created_after: 2018-10-02T15:00:00Z
    foo/baz:
      token_created_after: 2019-10-02T15:00:00Z

Workflow example

Suppose the current org_repo_config in the managed_webhooks configuration is

qux:
  token_created_after: 2017-10-02T15:00:00Z
foo/bar:
  token_created_after: 2018-10-02T15:00:00Z
foo/baz:
  token_created_after: 2019-10-02T15:00:00Z

There can be 3 scenarios to modify the configuration, as explained below:

Rotate an existing HMAC token

User updates the token_created_after for foo/baz to a later time, as shown below:

qux:
  token_created_after: 2017-10-02T15:00:00Z
foo/bar:
  token_created_after: 2018-10-02T15:00:00Z
foo/baz:
  token_created_after: 2020-03-02T15:00:00Z

The hmac tool will generate a new HMAC token for the foo/baz repo, add the new token to the secret, and update the webhook for the repo. And after the update finishes, it will delete the old token.

Onboard a new repo

User adds a new repo foo/bax in the managed_webhooks configuration, as shown below:

qux:
  token_created_after: 2017-10-02T15:00:00Z
foo/bar:
  token_created_after: 2018-10-02T15:00:00Z
foo/baz:
  token_created_after: 2019-10-02T15:00:00Z
foo/bax:
  token_created_after: 2020-03-02T15:00:00Z

The hmac tool will generate an HMAC token for the foo/bax repo, add the token to the secret, and add the webhook for the repo.

Remove an existing repo

User deletes the repo foo/baz from the managed_webhooks configuration, as shown below:

qux:
  token_created_after: 2017-10-02T15:00:00Z
foo/bar:
  token_created_after: 2018-10-02T15:00:00Z

The hmac tool will delete the HMAC token for the foo/baz repo from the secret, and delete the corresponding webhook for this repo.

Note the 3 types of config changes can happen together, and hmac tool is able to handle all the changes in one single run.

3.2.6 - jenkins-operator

jenkins-operator is a controller that enables Prow to use Jenkins as a backend for running jobs.

Jenkins configuration

A Jenkins master needs to be provided via --jenkins-url in order for the operator to make requests to. By default, --dry-run is set to true so the operator will not make any mutating requests to Jenkins, GitHub, and Kubernetes, but you most probably want to set it to false. The Jenkins operator expects to read the Prow configuration by default in /etc/config/config.yaml which can be configured with --config-path.

The following stanza is config that can be optionally set in the Prow config file:

jenkins_operators:
- max_concurrency: 150
  max_goroutines: 20
  job_url_template: 'https://storage-for-logs/{{if eq .Spec.Type "presubmit"}}pr-logs/pull{{else if eq .Spec.Type "batch"}}pr-logs/pull{{else}}logs{{end}}{{if ne .Spec.Refs.Repo "origin"}}/{{.Spec.Refs.Org}}_{{.Spec.Refs.Repo}}{{end}}{{if eq .Spec.Type "presubmit"}}/{{with index .Spec.Refs.Pulls 0}}{{.Number}}{{end}}{{else if eq .Spec.Type "batch"}}/batch{{end}}/{{.Spec.Job}}/{{.Status.BuildID}}/'
  report_template: '[Full PR test history](https://pr-history/{{if ne .Spec.Refs.Repo "origin"}}{{.Spec.Refs.Org}}_{{.Spec.Refs.Repo}}/{{end}}{{with index .Spec.Refs.Pulls 0}}{{.Number}}{{end}}).'

max_concurrency is the maximum number of Jenkins builds that can run in parallel, otherwise the operator is not going to start new builds. Defaults to 0, which means no limit.
max_goroutines is the maximum number of goroutines that the operator will spin up to handle all Jenkins builds. Defaulted to 20.
job_url_template is a Golang-templated URL that shows up in the Details button next to the GitHub job status context. A ProwJob is provided as input to the template.
report_template is a Golang-templated message that shows up in GitHub in case of a job failure. A ProwJob is provided as input to the template.

Security

Various flavors of authentication are supported:

basic auth, using --jenkins-user and --jenkins-token-file.
OpenShift bearer token auth, using --jenkins-bearer-token-file.
certificate-based auth, using --cert-file, --key-file, and optionally --ca-cert-file.

Basic auth and bearer token are mutually exclusive options whereas cert-based auth is complementary to both of them.

If CSRF protection is enabled in Jenkins, --csrf-protect=true needs to be used on the operator’s side to allow Prow to work correctly.

Logs

Apart from a controller, the Jenkins operator also runs a http server to serve Jenkins logs. You can configure the Prow frontend to show Jenkins logs with the following Prow config:

deck:
  external_agent_logs:
  - agent: jenkins
    url_template: 'http://jenkins-operator/job/{{.Spec.Job}}/{{.Status.BuildID}}/consoleText'

Deck uses url_template to contact jenkins-operator when a user clicks the Build log button of a Jenkins job (agent: jenkins). jenkins-operator forwards the request to Jenkins and serves back the response.

NOTE: Deck will display the Build log button on the main page when the agent is not kubernetes regardless the external agent log was configured on the server side. Deck has no way to know if the server side configuration is consistent when rendering jobs on the main page.

Job configuration

Below follows the Prow configuration for a Jenkins job:

presubmits:
  org/repo:
  - name: pull-request-unit
    agent: jenkins
    always_run: true
    context: ci/prow/unit
    rerun_command: "/test unit"
    trigger: "((?m)^/test( all| unit),?(\\s+|$))"

You can read more about the different types of Prow jobs elsewhere. What is interesting for us here is the agent field which needs to be set to jenkins in order for jobs to be dispatched to Jenkins and name which is the name of the job inside Jenkins.

The following parameters must be added within each Jenkins job:

BUILD_ID
PROW_JOB_ID

Sharding

Sharding of Jenkins jobs is supported via Kubernetes labels and label selectors. This enables Prow to work with multiple Jenkins masters. Three places need to be configured in order to use sharding:

--label-selector in the Jenkins operator.
label_selector in jenkins_operators in the Prow config.
labels in the job config.

For example, one would set the following options:

--label-selector=master=jenkins-master in a Jenkins operator.

This option forces the operator to list all ProwJobs with master=jenkins-master.

label_selector: master=jenkins-master in the Prow config.

jenkins_operators:
- label_selector: master=jenkins-master
  max_concurrency: 150
  max_goroutines: 20

jenkins_operators in the Prow config can be read by multiple running operators and based on label_selector, each operator knows which config stanza does it need to use. Thus, --label-selector and label_selector need to match exactly.

labels: jenkins-master in the job config.

presubmits:
  org/repo:
  - name: pull-request-unit
    agent: jenkins
    labels:
      master: jenkins-master
    always_run: true
    context: ci/prow/unit
    rerun_command: "/test unit"
    trigger: "((?m)^/test( all| unit),?(\\s+|$))"

Labels in the job config are set in ProwJobs during their creation.

Kubernetes client

The Jenkins operator acts as a Kubernetes client since it manages ProwJobs backed by Jenkins builds. It is expected to run as a pod inside a Kubernetes cluster and so it uses the in-cluster client config.

GitHub integration

The operator needs to talk to GitHub for updating commit statuses and adding comments about failed tests. Note that this functionality may potentially move into its own service, then the Jenkins operator will not need to contact the GitHub API. The required options are already defaulted:

github-token-path set to /etc/github/oauth. This is the GitHub bot oauth token that is used for updating job statuses and adding comments in GitHub.
github-endpoint set to https://api.github.com.

Prometheus support

The following Prometheus metrics are exposed by the operator:

jenkins_requests is the number of Jenkins requests made.
- verb is the type of request (GET, POST)
- handler is the path of the request, usually containing a job name (eg. job/test-pull-request-unit).
- code is the status code of the request (200, 404, etc.).
jenkins_request_retries is the number of Jenkins request retries made.
jenkins_request_latency is the time for a request to roundtrip between the operator and Jenkins.
resync_period_seconds is the time the operator takes to complete one reconciliation loop.
prowjobs is the number of Jenkins prowjobs in the system.
- job_name is the name of the job.
- type is the type of the prowjob: presubmit, postsubmit, periodic, batch
- state is the state of the prowjob: triggered, pending, success, failure, aborted, error

If a push gateway needs to be used it can be configured in the Prow config:

push_gateway:
  endpoint: http://prometheus-push-gateway
  interval: 1m

3.2.7 - status-reconciler

status-reconciler ensures that changes to blocking presubmits in Prow configuration while PRs are in flight do not cause those PRs to get stuck.

When the set of blocking presubmits changes for a repository, one of three cases occurs:

a new blocking presubmit exists and should be triggered for every trusted pull request in flight
an existing blocking presubmit is removed and should have its' status retired
an existing blocking presubmit is renamed and should have its' status migrated

The status-reconciler watches the job configuration for Prow and ensures that the above actions are taken as necessary.

To exclude repos from being reconciled, passing flag --denylist, this can be done repeatedly. This is useful when moving a repo from prow instance A to prow instance B, while unwinding jobs from prow instance A, the jobs are not expected to be blindly lablled succeed by prow instance A.

Note that status-reconciler is edge driven (not level driven) so it can’t be used retrospectively.

3.2.8 - tot

This is a placeholder page. Some contents needs to be filled.

3.2.8.1 - fallbackcheck

Ensure your GCS bucket layout is what tot expects to use. Useful when you want to transition from versioning your GCS buckets away from Jenkins build numbers to build numbers vended by prow.

fallbackcheck checks the existence of latest-build.txt files as per the documented GCS layout. It ignores jobs that have no GCS buckets.

Install

go get sigs.k8s.io/prow/cmd/tot/fallbackcheck

Run

fallbackcheck -bucket GCS_BUCKET -prow-url LIVE_DECK_DEPLOYMENT

For example:

fallbackcheck -bucket https://gcsweb-ci.svc.ci.openshift.org/gcs/origin-ci-test/ -prow-url https://deck-ci.svc.ci.openshift.org/

3.2.9 - Gangway (Prow API)

Gangway is an optional component which allows you to interact with Prow in a programmatic way (through an API).

Architecture

See the design doc.

Gangway uses gRPC to serve several endpoints. These can be seen in the gangway.proto file, which describes the gRPC endpoints. The proto describes the interface at a high level, and is converted into low-level Golang types into gangway.pb.go and gangway_grpc.pb.go. These low-level Golang types are then used in the gangway.go file to implement the high-level intent of the proto file.

As Gangway only understands gRPC natively, if you want to use a REST client against it you must deploy Gangway. For example, on GKE you can use Cloud Endpoints and deploy Gangway behind a reverse proxy called “ESPv2”. This ESPv2 container will forward HTTP requests made to it to the equivalent gRPC endpoint in Gangway and back again.

Configuration setup

Server-side configuration

Gangway has its own security check to see whether the client is allowed to, for example, trigger the job that it wants to trigger (we don’t want to let any random client trigger any Prow Job that Prow knows about). In the central Prow config under the gangway section, prospective Gangway users can list themselves in there. For an example, see the section filled out for Gangway’s own integration tests and search for allowed_jobs_filters.

Client-side configuration

The table below lists the supported endpoints.

Endpoint	Description
CreateJobExecution	Triggers a new Prow Job.
GetJobExecution	Get the status of a Prow Job.
ListJobExecutions	List all Prow Jobs that match the query.

See gangway.proto and the Gangway Google client.

Tutorial

See the example.

3.2.10 - Sub

Triggers Prow jobs from Pub/Sub.

Sub is a Prow component that can trigger new Prow jobs (PJs) using Pub/Sub messages. The message does not need to have the full PJ defined; instead you just need to have the job name and some other key pieces of information (more on this below). The rest of the data needed to create a full-blown PJ is derived from the main Prow configuration (or inrepoconfig).

Deployment Usage

Sub can listen to Pub/Sub subscriptions (known as “pull subscriptions”).

When deploy the sub component, you need to specify --config-path to your prow config, and optionally --job-config-path to your prowjob config if you have split them up.

Notable options:

--dry-run: Dry run for testing. Uses API tokens but does not mutate.
--grace-period: On shutdown, try to handle remaining events for the specified duration.
--port: On shutdown, try to handle remaining events for the specified duration.
--github-app-id and --github-app-private-key-path=/etc/github/cert: Used to authenticate to GitHub for cloning operations as a GitHub app. Mutually exclusive with --cookiefile.
--cookiefile: Used to authenticate git when cloning from https://... URLs. See http.cookieFile in man git-config.
--in-repo-config-cache-size: Used to cache Prow configurations fetched from inrepoconfig-enabled repos.

flowchart TD

    classDef yellow fill:#ff0
    classDef cyan fill:#0ff
    classDef pink fill:#f99

    subgraph Service Cluster
        PCM[Prow Controller Manager]:::cyan
        Prowjob:::yellow
        subgraph Sub
            staticconfig["Static Config
                (/etc/job-config)"]
            inrepoconfig["Inrepoconfig
                (git clone &lt;inrepoconfig&gt;)"]
            YesOrNo{"Is my-prow-job-name
                in the config?"}
            Yes
            No
        end
    end

    subgraph Build Cluster
        Pod:::yellow
    end

    subgraph GCP Project
        subgraph Pub/Sub
            Topic
            Subscription
        end
    end
    
    subgraph Message
        Payload["{&quot;data&quot;:
            {&quot;name&quot;:&quot;my-prow-job-name&quot;,
            &quot;attributes&quot;:{&quot;prow.k8s.io/pubsub.EventType&quot;: &quot;...&quot;},
            &quot;data&quot;: ...,
            ..."]
    end

    Message --> Topic --> Subscription --> Sub --> |Pulls| Subscription
    staticconfig --> YesOrNo
    inrepoconfig -.-> YesOrNo
    YesOrNo --> Yes --> |Create| Prowjob --> PCM --> |Create| Pod
    YesOrNo --> No --> |Report failure| Topic

Sending a Pub/Sub Message

Pub/Sub has a generic PubsubMessage type that has the following JSON structure:

{
  "data": string,
  "attributes": {
    string: string,
    ...
  },
  "messageId": string,
  "publishTime": string,
  "orderingKey": string
}

The Prow-specific information is encoded as JSON as the string value of the data key.

Pull Server

All pull subscriptions need to be defined in Prow Configuration:

pubsub_subscriptions:
  "gcp-project-01":
  - "subscription-01"
  - "subscription-02"
  - "subscription-03"
  "gcp-project-02":
  - "subscription-01"
  - "subscription-02"
  - "subscription-03"

Sub must be running with GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable pointing to the service account credentials JSON file. The service account used must have the right permission on the subscriptions (Pub/Sub Subscriber, and Pub/Sub Editor).

More information at https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/docs/access-control.

Periodic Prow Jobs

When creating your Pub/Sub message, for the attributes field, add a key prow.k8s.io/pubsub.EventType with value prow.k8s.io/pubsub.PeriodicProwJobEvent. Then for the data field, use the following JSON as the value:

{
  "name":"my-periodic-job",
  "envs":{
    "GIT_BRANCH":"v.1.2",
    "MY_ENV":"overwrite"
  },
  "labels":{
    "myLabel":"myValue",
  },
  "annotations":{
    # GCP project where Prow Job statuses are published by Prow. Must also
    # provide "prow.k8s.io/pubsub.topic" to take effect.
    #
    # It's highly recommended to configure this even if prowjobs are monitored
    # by other means, because this is also where errors are reported when the
    # jobs are failed to be triggered.
    "prow.k8s.io/pubsub.project":"myProject",

    # Unique run ID.
    "prow.k8s.io/pubsub.runID":"asdfasdfasdf",

    # GCP pubsub topic where Prow Job statuses are published by Prow. Must be a
    # different topic from where this payload is published to.
    "prow.k8s.io/pubsub.topic":"myTopic"
  }
}

Note: the # lines are comments for purposes of explanation in this doc; JSON does not permit comments so make sure to remove them in your actual payload.

The above payload will ask Prow to find and trigger the periodic job named my-periodic-job, and add/overwrite the annotations and environment variables on top of the job’s default annotations. The prow.k8s.io/pubsub.* annotations are used to publish job statuses.

Note: periodic jobs always clone source code from ref (a branch) instead of a specific SHA. If you need to trigger a job based on a specific SHA you can use a postsubmit job instead.

Postsubmit Prow Jobs

Triggering presubmit job is similar to periodic jobs. Two things to change:

instead of an attributes with key prow.k8s.io/pubsub.EventType and value prow.k8s.io/pubsub.PeriodicProwJobEvent, replace the value with prow.k8s.io/pubsub.PostsubmitProwJobEvent
requires setting refs instructing postsubmit jobs how to clone source code:

{
  # Common fields as above
  "name":"my-postsubmit-job",
  "envs":{...},
  "labels":{...},
  "annotations":{...},

  "refs":{
    "org": "org-a",
    "repo": "repo-b",
    "base_ref": "main",
    "base_sha": "abc123"
  }
}

This will start postsubmit job my-postsubmit-job, clones source code from base_ref at base_sha.

(There are more fields can be supplied, see full documentation)

Presubmit Prow Jobs

Triggering presubmit jobs is similar to postsubmit jobs. Two things to change:

instead of an attributes with key prow.k8s.io/pubsub.EventType and value prow.k8s.io/pubsub.PostsubmitProwJobEvent, replace the value with prow.k8s.io/pubsub.PresubmitProwJobEvent
for the refs field, additionally supply a pulls field, like this:

{
  # Common fields as above
  "name":"my-presubmit-job",
  "envs":{...},
  "labels":{...},
  "annotations":{...},

  "refs":{
    "org": "org-a",
    "repo": "repo-b",
    "base_ref": "main",
    "base_sha": "abc123",
    "pulls": [
      {
        "sha": "def456"
      }
    ]
  }
}

This will start presubmit job my-presubmit-job, clones source code like pull requests defined under pulls, which merges to base_ref at base_sha.

(There are more fields that can be supplied, see full documentation. For example, if you want the job to be reported on the PR, add number field right next to sha)

Gerrit Presubmits and Postsubmits

Gerrit presubmit and postsubmit jobs require some additional labels and annotations to be specified in the pubsub payload if you wish for them to report results back to the Gerrit change. Specifically the following annotations must be supplied (values are examples):

  annotations:
    prow.k8s.io/gerrit-id: my-repo~master~I79eee198f020c2ff23d49dbe4d2b2ef7cdc4091b
    prow.k8s.io/gerrit-instance: https://my-project-review.googlesource.com
  labels:
    prow.k8s.io/gerrit-patchset: "4"
    prow.k8s.io/gerrit-revision: 2b8cafaab9bd3a829a6bdaa819a18f908bc677ca

3.3 - CLI Tools

3.3.1 - checkconfig

checkconfig loads the Prow configuration given with --config-path, --job-config-path and --plugin-config in order to validate it. Use checkconfig as a pre-submit for any repository holding Prow configuration to ensure that check-ins do not break anything.

3.3.2 - config-bootstrapper

config-bootstrapper is used to bootstrap a configuration that would be incrementally updated by the config-updater Prow plugin.

When a set of configurations do not exist (for example, on a clean redeployment or in a disaster recovery situation), the config-updater plugin is not useful as it can only upload incremental updates. This tool is meant to be used in those situations to set up the config to the correct base state and hand off ownership to the plugin for updates.

Provide the config-bootstrapper with the latest state of the Prow configuration (plugins.yaml, config.yaml, any job configuration files) to boot-strap with the latest configuration.

Sample usage:

./config-bootstrapper \
    --dry-run=false \
    --source-path=.  \
    --config-path=prowconfig/config.yaml \
    --plugin-config=prowconfig/plugins.yaml \
    --job-config-path=prowconfig/jobs

3.3.3 - generic-autobumper

This tool automates the version upgrading of images such as the prow.k8s.io Prow deployment. Its workflow is:

Given a local git repo containing the manifests of Prow component deployment, e.g., /config/prow/cluster folder in this repo.
Find out the most recent tags of given prefixes in gcr.io registry and modify the yaml files with them.
git-commit the change, push it to the remote repo, and create/update a PR, e.g., test-infra/pull/14249, for the change.

The cluster admins can upgrade the version of images by approving the PR.

Define Prow jobs to utilize this tool:

Periodic job for the above workflow: Periodically generate PRs for bumping the version, e.g., ci-test-infra-autobump-prow.
Postsubmit job for auto-deployment: In order to make the changes effective in Prow-cluster, a postsubmit job, e.g., post-test-infra-deploy-prow for prow.k8s.io is defined for deploying the yaml files.

Requirement

We need to fulfil those requirements to use this tool:

a “committable” local repo, i.e., git-commit command can be executed successfully, e.g., git-config is set up correctly. This can be achieved by clone the repo by extra_refs, e.g.,
```
  extra_refs:
  - org: kubernetes
    repo: test-infra
    base_ref: master
```
a GitHub token which has permissions to be used by this tool to push changes and create PRs against the remote repo.
a yaml config file that specifies the follwing information passed in with the flag -config=FILEPATH:
For info about what should go in the config look at the documentation for the Options here and look at the example below.

e.g.,

gitHubLogin: "k8s-ci-robot"
gitHubToken: "/etc/github-token/oauth"
gitName: "Kubernetes Prow Robot"
gitEmail: "k8s.ci.robot@gmail.com"
onCallAddress: "https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-jenkins/oncall.json"
skipPullRequest: false
gitHubOrg: "kubernetes"
gitHubRepo: "test-infra"
remoteName: "test-infra"
upstreamURLBase: "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/test-infra/master"
includedConfigPaths:
  - "."
excludedConfigPaths:
  - "config/prow-staging"
extraFiles:
  - "config/jobs/kubernetes/kops/build-grid.py"
  - "config/jobs/kubernetes/kops/build-pipeline.py"
  - "releng/generate_tests.py"
  - "images/kubekins-e2e/Dockerfile"
targetVersion: "latest"
prefixes:
  - name: "Prow"
    prefix: "gcr.io/k8s-prow/"
    refConfigFile: "config/prow/cluster/deck_deployment.yaml"
    stagingRefConfigFile: "config/prow-staging/cluster/deck_deployment.yaml"
    repo: "https://github.com/kubernetes/test-infra"
    summarise: true
    consistentImages: true
  - name: "Boskos"
    prefix: "gcr.io/k8s-staging-boskos/"
    refConfigFile: "config/prow/cluster/build/boskos.yaml"
    stagingRefConfigFile: "config/prow-staging/cluster/boskos.yaml"
    repo: "https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/boskos"
    summarise: false
    consistentImages: true
  - name: "Prow-Test-Images"
    prefix: "gcr.io/k8s-testimages/"
    repo: "https://github.com/kubernetes/test-infra"
    summarise: false
    consistentImages: false

3.3.4 - invitations-accepter

The invitations-accepter tool approves all pending repository invitations.

Usage

example:

invitations-accepter --dry-run=false --github-token-path=/etc/github/oauth

using with GitHub Apps

invitations-accepter --dry-run=false --github-app-id=12345 --github-app-private-key-path=/etc/github/cert

3.3.5 - mkpj

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3.3.6 - mkpod

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3.3.7 - Peribolos

Peribolos allows the org settings, teams and memberships to be declared in a yaml file. GitHub is then updated to match the declared configuration.

See the kubernetes/org repo, in particular the merge and update.sh parts of that repo for this tool in action.

Peribolos was the subject of a KubeCon talk: How Kubernetes Uses GitOps to Manage GitHub Communities at Scale

Etymology

A peribolos is a wall that encloses a court in Greek/Roman architecture.

Org configuration

Extend the primary prow config.yaml document to include a top-level orgs key that looks like the following:

orgs:
  this-org:
    # org settings
    company: foo
    email: foo
    name: foo
    description: foo
    has_organization_projects: true
    has_repository_projects: true
    default_repository_permission: read
    members_can_create_repositories: false

    # org member settings
    members:
    - anne
    - bob
    admins:
    - carl

    # team settings
    teams:
      node:
        # team config
        description: people working on node backend
        privacy: closed
        previously:
        - backend  # If a backend team exists, rename it to node

        # team members
        members:
        - anne
        maintainers:
        - jane
        repos: # Ensure the team has the following permissions levels on repos in the org
          some-repo: admin
          other-repo: read
      another-team:
        ...
      ...
  that-org:
    ...

This config will:

Ensure the org settings match the following:
- Set the company, email, name and descriptions fields for the org to foo
- Allow projects to be created at the org and repo levels
- Give everyone read access to repos by default
- Disallow members from creating repositories
Ensure the following memberships exist:
- anne and bob are members, carl is an admin
Configure the node and another-team in the following manner:
- Set node’s description and privacy setting.
- Rename the backend team to node
- Add anne as a member and jane as a maintainer to node
- Similar things for another-team (details elided)
Ensure that the team has admin rights to some-repo, read access to other-repo and no other privileges

Note that any fields missing from the config will not be managed by peribolos. So if description is missing from the org setting, the current value will remain.

For more details please see GitHub documentation around edit org, update org membership, edit team, update team membership.

Initial seed

Peribolos can dump the current configuration to an org. For example you could dump the kubernetes org do the following:

$ go run ./cmd/peribolos --dump kubernetes-sigs --github-token-path ~/github-token | tee ~/current.yaml
...
INFO: Build completed successfully, 1 total action
...
{"client":"github","component":"peribolos","level":"info","msg":"GetOrg(kubernetes-sigs)","time":"2018-09-28T13:17:42-07:00"}
{"client":"github","component":"peribolos","level":"info","msg":"ListOrgMembers(kubernetes-sigs, admin)","time":"2018-09-28T13:17:42-07:00"}
{"client":"github","component":"peribolos","level":"info","msg":"ListOrgMembers(kubernetes-sigs, member)","time":"2018-09-28T13:17:43-07:00"}
{"client":"github","component":"peribolos","level":"info","msg":"ListTeams(kubernetes-sigs)","time":"2018-09-28T13:17:45-07:00"}
{"client":"github","component":"peribolos","level":"info","msg":"ListTeamMembers(2671356, maintainer)","time":"2018-09-28T13:17:46-07:00"}
{"client":"github","component":"peribolos","level":"info","msg":"ListTeamMembers(2671356, member)","time":"2018-09-28T13:17:46-07:00"}
...
admins:
- calebamiles
- cblecker
- etc
billing_email: secret@example.com
company: ""
default_repository_permission: read
description: Org for Kubernetes SIG-related work
email: ""
has_organization_projects: true
has_repository_projects: true
location: ""
members:
- ameukam
- amwat
- ant31
- etc
teams:
  application-admins:
    description: admin access to application
    maintainers:
    - kow3ns
    members:
    - mattfarina
    - prydonius
    privacy: closed
  architecture-tracking-admins:
    description: admin permission for architecture-tracking
    maintainers:
    - jdumars
    - bgrant0607
    privacy: closed
  # etc

Open ~/current.yaml and then delete any metadata you don’t want peribolos to manage (such as billing_email, or all the teams, etc).

Apply this config in dry-run mode to see what would happen (hopefully nothing since you just created it):

$ go run ./cmd/peribolos --config-path ~/current.yaml --github-token-path ~/github-token # --confirm

{"client":"github","component":"peribolos","level":"info","msg":"GetOrg(kubernetes-sigs)","time":"2018-09-27T23:07:13Z"}
{"client":"github","component":"peribolos","level":"info","msg":"ListOrgInvitations(kubernetes-sigs)","time":"2018-09-27T23:07:13Z"}
{"client":"github","component":"peribolos","level":"info","msg":"ListOrgMembers(kubernetes-sigs, admin)","time":"2018-09-27T23:07:13Z"}
{"client":"github","component":"peribolos","level":"info","msg":"ListOrgMembers(kubernetes-sigs, member)","time":"2018-09-27T23:07:14Z"}
...

Settings

In order to mitigate the chance of applying erroneous configs, the peribolos binary includes a few safety checks:

--required-admins= - a list of people who must be configured as admins in order to accept the config (defaults to empty list)
--min-admins=5 - the config must specify at least this many admins
--require-self=true - require the bot applying the config to be an admin.

These flags are designed to ensure that any problems can be corrected by rerunning the tool with a fixed config and/or binary.

--maximum-removal-delta=0.25 - reject a config that deletes more than 25% of the current memberships.

This flag is designed to protect against typos in the configuration which might cause massive, unwanted deletions. Raising this value to 1.0 will allow deleting everyone, and reducing it to 0.0 will prevent any deletions.

--confirm=false - no github mutations will be made until this flag is true. It is safe to run the binary without this flag. It will print what it would do, without actually making any changes.

See go run ./cmd/peribolos --help for the full and current list of settings that can be configured with flags.

3.3.8 - Phony

phony sends fake GitHub webhooks.

Running a GitHub event manager

phony is most commonly used for testing hook and its plugins, but can be used for testing any externally exposed service configured to receive GitHub events (external plugins).

To get an idea of phony’s behavior, start a local instance of hook with this:

go run cmd/hook/main.go \
 --config-path=config/prow/config.yaml \
 --plugin-config=config/prow/plugins.yaml \
 --hmac-secret-file=path/to/hmac \
 --github-token-path=path/to/github-token

# Note:
# --hmac-secret-file is required for running locally, use the same hmac token for phony below

Usage

Once you have a running server that manages github webhook events, generate an hmac token (same process as in prow), and point a phony pull request event at it with the following:

phony --help
Usage of ./phony:
  -address string
     Where to send the fake hook. (default "http://localhost:8888/hook")
  -event string
     Type of event to send, such as pull_request. (default "ping")
  -hmac string
     HMAC token to sign payload with. (default "abcde12345")
  -payload string
     File to send as payload. If unspecified, sends "{}".

If you are testing hook and successfully sent the webhook from phony, you should see a log from hook resembling the following:

{"author":"","component":"hook","event-GUID":"GUID","event-type":"pull_request","level":"info","msg":"Pull request .","org":"","pr":0,"repo":"","time":"2018-05-29T11:38:57-07:00","url":""}

A list of supported events can be found in the GitHub API Docs. Some example event payloads can be found in the examples directory.

3.3.9 - tackle

Prow’s tackle utility walks you through deploying a new instance of prow in a couple of minutes, try it out!

Installing tackle

Tackle at this point in time needs to be built from source. The following steps will walk you through the process:

Clone the test-infra repository:

git clone git@github.com:kubernetes/test-infra.git

Build tackle (This requires a working go installation on your system)

cd test-infra/prow/cmd/tackle && go build -o tackle

Optionally move tackle to your $PATH

sudo mv tackle /usr/sbin/tackle

Deploying prow

Note: Creating a cluster using the tackle utility assumes you have the gcloud application in your $PATH and are logged in. If you are doing this on another cloud skip to the Manual deployment below.

Installing Prow using tackle will help you through the following steps:

Choosing a kubectl context (or creating a cluster on GCP / getting its credentials if necessary)
Deploying prow into that cluster
Configuring GitHub to send prow webhooks for your repos. This is where you’ll provide the absolute /path/to/github/token

To install prow run the following and follow the on-screen instructions:

Run tackle:

tackle

Once your cluster is created, you’ll get a prompt to apply a starter.yaml. Before you do that open another terminal and apply the prow CRDs using:

kubectl apply --server-side=true -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/test-infra/master/config/prow/cluster/prowjob-crd/prowjob_customresourcedefinition.yaml

After that specify the starter.yaml you want to use (please make sure to replace the values mentioned here). Once that is done some pods still won’t be in the Running state because we haven’t created the secret containing the credentials needed for our GCS bucket. To do that follow the steps in Configure a GCS bucket.
Once that is done, tackle should show you the URL where you can access the prow dashboard. To use it with your repositories head over to the settings of the GitHub app you created and there under webhook secret, supply the HMAC token you specified in the starter.yaml.
Once that is done, install the GitHub app on the repositories you want (this is only needed if you ran tackle with the --skip-github flag) and you should now be able to use Prow :)

See the Next Steps section after running this utility.

3.4 - Pod Utilities

Pod utilities are small, focused Go programs used by plank to decorate user-provided PodSpecs in order to increase the ease of integration for new jobs into the entire CI infrastructure. The utilities today wrap the execution of the test code to ensure that the tests run against correct versions of the source code, that test commands run in the appropriate environment and that output from the test (in the form of status, logs and artifacts) is correctly uploaded to the cloud.

These utilities are integrated into a test run by adding InitContainers and sidecar Containers to the user-provided PodSpec, as well as by overwriting the Container entrypoint for the test Container provided by the user. The following utilities exist today:

clonerefs: clones source code under test
initupload: records the beginning of a test in cloud storage and reports the status of the clone operations
entrypoint: is injected into the test Container, wraps the test code to capture logs and exit status
sidecar: runs alongside the test Container, uploads status, logs and test artifacts to cloud storage once the test is finished

Why use Pod Utilities?

Writing a ProwJob that uses the Pod Utilities is much easier than writing one that doesn’t because the Pod Utilities will transparently handle many of the tasks the job would otherwise need to do in order to prepare its environment and output more than pass/fail. Historically, this was achieved by wrapping every job with a bootstrap.py script that handled cloning source code, preparing the test environment, and uploading job metadata, logs, and artifacts. This was cumbersome to configure and required every job to be wrapped with the script in the job image. The pod utilities achieve the same goals with less configuration and much simpler job images that are easier to develop and less coupled to Prow.

Writing a ProwJob that uses Pod Utilities

What the test container can expect

Example test container script:

pwd # my repo root
ls path/to/file/in/my/repo.txt # access repo file
ls ../other-repo # access repo file in another repo
echo success > ${ARTIFACTS}/results.txt # result info that will be uploaded to GCS.
# logs, and job metadata are automatically uploaded.

More specifically, a ProwJob using the Pod Utilities can expect the following:

Source Code - Jobs can expect to begin execution with their working directory set as the root of the checked out repo. The commit that is checked out depends on the type of job:
- presubmit jobs will have the relevant PR checked out and merged with the base branch.
- postsubmit jobs will have the upstream commit that triggered the job checked out.
- periodic jobs will have the working directory set to the root of the repo specified by the first ref in extra_refs (if specified). See the extra_refs field if you need to clone more than one repo.
Metadata and Logs - Jobs can expect metadata about the job to be uploaded before the job starts, and additional metadata and logs to be uploaded when the job completes.
Artifact Directory - Jobs can expect an $ARTIFACTS environment variable to be specified. It indicates an existent directory where job artifacts can be dumped for automatic upload to GCS upon job completion.

How to configure

In order to use the pod utilities, you will need to configure plank with some settings first. See plank’s README for reference.

ProwJobs may request Pod Utility decoration by setting decorate: true in their config. Example ProwJob configuration:


  - name: pull-job
    always_run: true
    decorate: true
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: alpine
        command:
        - "echo"
        args:
        - "The artifacts dir is $(ARTIFACTS)"

In addition to normal ProwJob configuration, ProwJobs using the Pod Utilities must specify the command field in the container specification instead of using the Dockerfile’s ENTRYPOINT directive. Note that the command field is a string array not just a string. It should point to the test binary location in the container.

Additional fields may be required for some use cases:

Private repos need to do two things:
- Add an ssh secret that gives the bot access to the repo to the build cluster and specify the secret name in the ssh_key_secrets field of the job decoration config.
- Set the clone_uri field of the job spec to git@github.com:{{.Org}}/{{.Repo}}.git.
Repos requiring a non-standard clone path can use the path_alias field to clone the repo to different go import path than the default of /home/prow/go/src/github.com/{{.Org}}/{{.Repo}}/ (e.g. path_alias: sigs.k8s.io/prow -> /home/prow/go/src/sigs.k8s.io/prow).
Jobs that require additional repos to be checked out can arrange for that with the exta_refs field. If the cloned path of this repo must be used as a default working dir the workdir: true must be specified.
Jobs that do not want submodules to be cloned should set skip_submodules to true
Jobs that want to perform shallow cloning can use clone_depth field. It can be set to desired clone depth. By default, clone_depth get set to 0 which results in full clone of repo.

- name: post-job
  decorate: true
  decoration_config:
    ssh_key_secrets:
    - ssh-secret
  clone_uri: "git@github.com:<YOUR_ORG>/<YOUR_REPO>.git"
  extra_refs:
  - org: kubernetes
    repo: other-repo
    base_ref: master
    workdir: false
  skip_submodules: true
  clone_depth: 0
  spec:
    containers:
    - image: alpine
      command:
      - "echo"
      args:
      - "The artifacts dir is $(ARTIFACTS)"

Migrating from bootstrap.py to Pod Utilities

Jobs using the deprecated bootstrap.py should switch to the Pod Utilities at their earliest convenience. @dims has created a handy migration guide.

Automatic Censoring of Secret Data

Many jobs exist that must touch third-party systems in order to be productive. Whether the job provisions resources in a cloud IaaS like GCP, reports results to an aggregation service like coveralls.io, or simply clones private repositories, jobs require sensitive credentials to achieve their goals. Even with the best intentions, it is possible for end-user code running in a test Pod for a ProwJob to accidentally leak the content of those credentials. If Prow is configured to push job logs and artifacts to a public cloud storage bucket, that leak is immediately immortalized in plain text for the world to read. The sidecar utility can infer what secrets a job has access to and censor those secrets from the output. The following job turns on censoring:

- name: censored-job
  decorate: true
  decoration_config:
    censor_secrets: true

Censoring Process

The automatic censoring process is written to be as useful as possible while having a bounded impact on the execution cost in resources and time for the job. In order to censor every possible leak, all keys in all Secrets that are mounted into the test Pod are treated as sensitive data. For each of these keys, the value of the key as well as the base-64 encoded value are censored from the job’s log as well as any artifacts the job produces. If any archives (e.g. .tar.gz) are found in the output artifacts for a job, they are unarchived in order to censor their contents on the fly before being re-archived and pushed up to cloud storage.

In order to bound the impact in runtime and resource cost for censoring on the job, both the concurrency and buffer size of the censoring algorithm are tunable. The overall steady-state memory footprint of the censoring algorithm is simply the buffer size times the maximum concurrency. The buffer must be as large as twice the length of the largest secret to be censored, but may be tuned to very small values in order to decrease the memory footprint. Keep mind that this will increase overall disk I/O and therefore increase the runtime of censoring. Therefore, in order to decrease censoring runtime the buffer should be increased.

Configuring Censoring

A number of aspects of the censoring algorithm are tunable with configuration option at the per-job level or for entire repositories or organizations. Under the decoration_config stanza, the following options are available to tune censoring:

decoration_config:
  censoring_options:
    censoring_concurrency: 0 # the number of files to censor concurrently; each allocates a buffer
    censoring_buffer_size: 0 # the size of the censoring buffer, in bytes
    include_directories:
    - path/**/to/*something.txt # globs relative to $ARTIFACTS that should be censored; everything censored if unset
    exclude_directories:
    - path/**/to/*other.txt # globs relative to $ARTIFACTS that should not be censored

3.4.1 - clonerefs

clonerefs clones code under test at the specified locations. Regardless of the success or failure of clone operations, this utility will have an exit code of 0 and will record the clone operation status to the specified log file. Clone records have the form:

[
    {
        "failed": false,
        "refs": {
            "org": "kubernetes",
            "repo": "kubernetes",
            "base_ref": "master",
            "base_sha": "a36820b10cde020818b8dd437e285d0e2e7d5e98",
            "pulls": [
                {
                    "number": 123,
                    "author": "smarterclayton",
                    "sha": "2b58234a8aee0d55918b158a3b38c292d6a95ef7"
                }
            ]
        },
        "commands": [
            {
                "command": "git init",
                "output": "Reinitialized existing Git repository in /go/src/k8s.io/kubernetes/.git/",
                "error": ""
            }
        ]
    }
]

Note: the utility will exit with a non-zero status if a fatal error is detected and no clone operations can even begin to run.

This utility is intended to be used with initupload, which will decode the JSON output by clonerefs and can format it for human consumption.

clonerefs can be configured by either passing in flags or by specifying a full set of options as JSON in the $CLONEREFS_OPTIONS environment variable, which has the form:

{
    "src_root": "/go",
    "log": "/logs/clone-log.txt",
    "git_user_name": "ci-robot",
    "git_user_email": "ci-robot@k8s.io",
    "refs": [
        {
            "org": "kubernetes",
            "repo": "kubernetes",
            "base_ref": "master",
            "base_sha": "a36820b10cde020818b8dd437e285d0e2e7d5e98",
            "pulls": [
                {
                    "number": 123,
                    "author": "smarterclayton",
                    "sha": "2b58234a8aee0d55918b158a3b38c292d6a95ef7"
                }
            ],
            "skip_submodules": true,
            "clone_depth": 0
        }
    ]
}

3.4.2 - entrypoint

entrypoint wraps a process and records its output to stdout and stderr as well as its exit code, recording both to disk. The utility will exit with a non-zero exit code if the wrapped process fails or if the utility has a fatal error.

This utility is intended to be used with sidecar, which will watch the files written by this utility and report on the status of the wrapped process.

entrypoint can be configured by either passing in flags or by specifying a full set of options as JSON in the $ENTRYPOINT_OPTIONS environment variable, which has the form:

{
    "args": [
        "/bin/ls",
        "-la"
    ],
    "timeout": 7200000000000,
    "grace_period": 15000000000,
    "process_log": "/logs/process-log.txt",
    "marker_file": "/logs/marker-file.txt"
}

Note: the "timeout" and "grace_period" fields hold the duration in nanoseconds.

3.4.3 - initupload

initupload reads clone records placed by clonerefs in order to determine job status. The status and logs from the clone operations are uploaded to cloud storage at a path resolved from the job configuration. This utility will exit with a non-zero exit code if the clone records indicate that any clone operations failed, as well as if any fatal errors are encountered in this utility itself.

initupload can be configured by either passing in flags or by specifying a full set of options as JSON in the $INITUPLOAD_OPTIONS environment variable, which has the same form as that for gcsupload, plus the "log" field. See that documentation for an explanation.

{
    "log": "/logs/clone-log.txt",
    "bucket": "kubernetes-jenkins",
    "sub_dir": "",
    "items": [
        "/logs/artifacts/"
    ],
    "path_strategy": "legacy",
    "default_org": "kubernetes",
    "default_repo": "kubernetes",
    "gcs_credentials_file": "/secrets/gcs/service-account.json",
    "dry_run": "false"
}

3.4.4 - sidecar

sidecar watches disk for files containing a the std{out,err} output from a process as well as its exit code; when the exit code has been written, this utility uploads a status object, the logs from the process and any other specified artifacts to cloud storage. The utility will exit with the exit code of the wrapped process or otherwise non-zero if the utility has a fatal error.

This utility is intended to be used with entrypoint, which will write the files watched by this utility.

sidecar can be configured by either passing in flags or by specifying a full set of options as JSON in the $SIDECAR_OPTIONS environment variable, which has the same form as that for gcsupload, plus the "process_log" and "marker_file" fields. See that documentation for an explanation.

{
    "wrapper_options": {
        "process_log": "/logs/process-log.txt",
        "marker_file": "/logs/marker-file.txt"
    },
    "gcs_options": {
        "bucket": "kubernetes-jenkins",
        "sub_dir": "",
        "items": [
            "/logs/artifacts/"
        ],
        "path_strategy": "legacy",
        "default_org": "kubernetes",
        "default_repo": "kubernetes",
        "gcs_credentials_file": "/secrets/gcs/service-account.json",
        "dry_run": "false"
    }
}

3.5 - Plugins

Plugins are sub-components of hook that consume GitHub webhooks related to their function and can be individually enabled per repo or org.

All plugin specific configuration is stored in plugins.yaml. The Configuration golang struct holds all the config fields organized into substructures by plugin. See its GoDoc for up-to-date descriptions of every config option.

Help Information

Most plugins lack README’s but instead generate PluginHelp structs on demand that include general explanations and help information in addition to details about the current configuration.

Please see https://prow.k8s.io/plugins for a list of all plugins deployed on the Kubernetes Prow instance, what they do, and what commands they offer. For an alternate view, please see https://prow.k8s.io/command-help to see all of the commands offered by the deployed plugins.

How to enable a plugin on a repo

Add an entry to plugins.yaml. If you misspell the name then a unit test will fail. If you have updateconfig plugin deployed then the config will be automatically updated once the PR is merged, else you will need to run make update-plugins. This does not require redeploying the binaries, and will take effect within a minute.

External Plugins

External plugins offer an alternative to compiling a plugin into the hook binary. Any web endpoint that can properly handle GitHub webhooks can be configured as an external plugin that hook will forward webhooks to. External plugin endpoints are specified per org or org/repo in plugins.yaml under the external_plugins field. Specific event types may be optionally specified to filter which events are forwarded to the endpoint. External plugins are well suited for:

Slow operations that would impact the performance of other plugins if run as part of hook.
Components that need to be triggered or notified of events beside GitHub webhooks.
Isolating a more or less privileged plugin or a plugin that executes PR code.
Integrating existing GitHub services with Prow.

Examples of external plugins can be found in the prow/external-plugins directory. The following is an example external plugin configuration that would live in plugins.yaml.

external_plugins:
  org-foo/repo-bar:
  - name: refresh-remote
    endpoint: https://my-refresh-plugin.com
    events:
    - issue_comment
  - name: needs-rebase
    # No endpoint specified implies "http://{{name}}".
    events:
    - pull_request
    # Dispatching issue_comment events to the needs-rebase plugin is optional. If enabled, this may cost up to two token per comment on a PR. If `ghproxy`
    # is in use, these two tokens are only needed if the PR or its mergeability changed.
    - issue_comment
  - name: cherrypick
    # No events specified implies all event types.

How to test a plugin

See “Building, Testing, and Updating Prow”.

3.5.1 - approve

This is a placeholder page. Some contents needs to be filled.

3.5.1.1 - Reviewers and Approvers

Questions this Doc Seeks To Answer

What are reviewers, approvers, and the OWNERS files?
How does the reviewer selection mechanism work? approver selection mechanism work?
How does an approver know which PR s/he has to approve?

Overview

Every GitHub directory which is a unit of independent code contains a file named “OWNERS”. The file lists reviewers and approvers for the directory. Approvers (or previously called assignees) are owners of the codes.

Approvers:

have contributed substantially to the repo
can provide an approval (/approve) indicating whether a change to a directory or subdirectory should be accepted
Approval is done on a per directory basis and subdirectories inherit their parents directory’s approvers

Reviewers:

generally a larger set of current and past contributors
They are responsible for a more thorough code review, discussing the implementation details and style
Provide an /lgtm when they are satisfied with the Pull Request. The /lgtm must be renewed whenever the Pull Request changes.

An example of the OWNERS file is listed below:

reviewers:
- jack
- ken
- lina

approvers:
- jack
- ken
- lina

Note that items in the OWNERS files can be GitHub usernames, or aliases defined in OWNERS_ALIASES files. An OWNERS_ALIASES file is another co-existed file that delivers a mechanism for defining groups. However, GitHub Team names are not supported. We do not use them because there is no audit log for changes to the GitHub Teams. This way we have an audit log.

Blunderbuss And Reviewers

lgtm Label

LGTM is abbreviation for “looks good to me”. The lgtm label is normally given when the code has been thoroughly reviewed. Getting it means the PR is one step away from getting merged. Reviewers of the PR give the label to a PR by typing /lgtm in a comment, or retract it by typing /lgtm cancel (at the beginning of a comment line). Authors of the PR cannot give the label, but they can cancel it. The bot retracts the label automatically if someone updates the PR with a new commit.

Any collaborator on the repo may use the /lgtm command, whether or not they are selected as a reviewer or approver by this plugin. (See the next section for reviewer and approver selection algorithm.)

Blunderbuss Selection Mechanism

Blunderbuss provides statistical means to select a subset of approvers found in OWNERS files for approving a PR. A PR consists of changes on one or more files, in which each file has different number of lines of codes changed. Blunderbuss determines the magnitude of code change within a PR using total number of lines of codes changed across various files. Number of reviewers selected for each PR is 2.

Algorithm for selecting reviewers is as follows:

determine potential reviewers of a file by going over all reviewers found in the OWNERS files for current and parent directories of the file (deduplication involved)
assign each changed file with a weightage based on number of lines of codes changed
assign each potential reviewer with a weightage by summing up weightages of all changed files in which s/he is a reviewer
randomly select 2 reviewers based on their weightage

Approval Handler and the Approved Label

approved Label

A PR cannot be merged into the repo without the approved label. In order for the approved label to be applied, every file modified by the PR must be approved (via /approve) by an approver from the OWNERs files. Note, this does not necessarily require multiple approvers. The process is best illustrated in the example below.

Approval Selection Mechanism

First, it is important to understand that ALL approvers in an OWNERS file can approve any file in that directory AND its subdirectories. Second, it is important to understand the somewhat-competing goals of the bot when selecting approvers:

Provide a subset of approvers that can approve all files in the PR
Provide a small subset of approvers and suggest the same reviewers as blunderbuss if possible (people can be both reviewers and approvers)
Do not always suggest the same set of people to approve and do not consistently suggest people from the root OWNERS file

The exact algorithm for selecting approvers is somewhat complex; it is an set cover approximation with consideration for existing assignees. To read it in depth, check out the approvers source code linked at the end of the README.

Example

Directory Structure

Suppose files in directories E and G are changed in a PR created by PRAuthor. Any combination of approver(s) listed below can approve the PR in order to get it merged:

approvers found in OWNERS files for leaf (current) directories E and G
approvers found in OWNERS files for parent directories B and C
approvers found in OWNERS files for root directory A

Note someone can be both a reviewer found in OWNERS files for directory A and E. If s/he is selected as an approver and gives approval, it approves entire PR because s/he is also a reviewer for the root directory A.

Step 1:

K8s-bot creates a comment that suggests the selected approvers and shows a list of OWNERS file(s) where the approvers can be found.

[APPROVALNOTIFIER] This PR is **NOT APPROVED**

This pull-request has been approved by: *PRAuthor*
We suggest the following additional approvers: **approver1,** **approver2**

If they are not already assigned, you can assign the PR to them by writing `/assign @approver1 @approver2` in a comment when ready.

∇ Details
Needs approval from an approver in each of these OWNERS Files:
* /A/B/E/OWNERS
* /A/C/G/OWNERS

You can indicate your approval by writing `/approve` in a comment
You can cancel your approval by writing `/approve cancel` in a comment

A selected approver such as approver1 can be notified by typing /assign @approver1 in a comment.

Step 2:

approver1 is in the E OWNERS file. S/he writes /approve

K8s-bot updates comment:

[APPROVALNOTIFIER] This PR is **NOT APPROVED**

This pull-request has been approved by: *approver1, PRAuthor*
We suggest the following additional approver: **approver2**

If they are not already assigned, you can assign the PR to them by writing /assign @approver2 in a comment when ready.

∇ Details
Needs approval from an approver in each of these OWNERS Files:
* ~/A/B/E/OWNERS~ [approver1]
* /A/C/G/OWNERS

You can indicate your approval by writing `/approve` in a comment
You can cancel your approval by writing `/approve cancel` in a comment

Step 3:

approver3 (an approver for D) is NOT an approver for any of the affected directories. S/he writes /approve

K8s-bot updates comment:

[APPROVALNOTIFIER] This PR is **NOT APPROVED**

This pull-request has been approved by: *approver1, approver3, PRAuthor* 
We suggest the following additional approvers: **approver2**

If they are not already assigned, you can assign the PR to them by writing /assign @approver1 @approver2 in a comment when ready.

∇ Details
Needs approval from an approver in each of these OWNERS Files:
* ~/A/B/E/OWNERS~ [approver1]
* /A/C/G/OWNERS

You can indicate your approval by writing `/approve` in a comment
You can cancel your approval by writing `/approve cancel` in a comment

Step 4:

approver1 is an approver of the PR. S/he writes /lgtm

K8s-bot updates comment:

[APPROVALNOTIFIER] This PR is **NOT APPROVED**

This pull-request has been approved by: *approver1, approver3, PRAuthor*
We suggest the following additional approver: **approver2**

If they are not already assigned, you can assign the PR to them by writing /assign @approver2 in a comment when ready.

∇ Details
Needs approval from an approver in each of these OWNERS Files:
* ~/A/B/E/OWNERS~ [approver1]
* /A/C/G/OWNERS

You can indicate your approval by writing `/approve` in a comment
You can cancel your approval by writing `/approve cancel` in a comment

The lgtm label is immediately added to the PR.

Step 5:

approver2 (who in the C OWNERS file, which is a parent to G) writes /approve

K8s-bot updates comment:

[APPROVALNOTIFIER] This PR is **APPROVED**

The following people have approved this PR: *approver1, approver2, approver3, PRAuthor*

∇ Details
Needs approval from an approver in each of these OWNERS Files:
* ~/A/B/E/OWNERS~ [approver1]
* ~/A/C/G/OWNERS~ [approver2]

You can indicate your approval by writing `/approve` in a comment
You can cancel your approval by writing `/approve cancel` in a comment

The PR is now unblocked from merging. If Tide is configured, the K8s-bot merges the PR, because it has both the lgtm and approved. It K8s-bot still needs to wait its turn in submit queue and pass tests.

Bot Notification for Approval Mechanism

Configuration options

See the Approve go struct for documentation of the options for this plugin.

See also the Lgtm go struct for documentation of the LGTM plugin’s options.

Final Notes

Obtaining approvals from selected approvers is the last step towards merging a PR. The approvers approve a PR by typing /approve in a comment, or retract it by typing /approve cancel.

Algorithm for getting the status is as follow:

run through all comments to obtain latest intention of approvers
put all approvers into an approver set
determine whether a file has at least one approver in the approver set
add the status to the PR if all files have been approved

If an approval is cancelled, the bot will delete the status added to the PR and remove the approver from the approver set. If someone who is not an approver in the OWNERS file types /approve in a comment, the PR will not be approved. If someone who is an approver in the OWNERS file and s/he does not get selected, s/he can still type /approve or /lgtm in a comment, pushing the PR forward.

Code Implementation Links

Blunderbuss: prow/plugins/blunderbuss/blunderbuss.go

LGTM: prow/plugins/lgtm/lgtm.go

Approve: prow/plugins/approve/approve.go

prow/plugins/approve/approvers/owners.go

3.5.2 - branchcleaner

The branchcleaner plugin automatically deletes source branches for merged PRs between two branches on the same repository. This is helpful to keep repos that don’t allow forking clean.

Usage

Enable the branchcleaner in the desired repos via the plugins.yaml:

plugins:
  org/repo:
  - branchcleaner

3.5.3 - lgtm

See the documentation in the approve plugin for details on the LGTM flow.

3.5.4 - updateconfig

updateconfig allows prow to update configmaps when files in a repo change.

updateconfig also supports glob match, or multi-key updates.

Usage

Update your plugins.yaml file to something along the following lines:

plugins:
  my-github/repo:
    plugins:
    - config-updater

config_updater:
  maps:
    # Update the thing-config configmap whenever thing changes
    path/to/some/other/thing:
      name: thing-config
    # If cluster and namespace configuration are unset, it will be put into the default cluster in the prowjob namespace
    path/to/some/other/thing2:
      name: thing2-config
      # Specify the clusters and namespaces that the configmap targets
      # which requires that the --kubeconfig arg is enabled for Hook
      # https://docs.prow.k8s.io/docs/getting-started-deploy/#run-test-pods-in-different-clusters
      # if not set or empty, it uses the cluster where prow components are running
      # and the specified namespace(s)
      clusters: 
        others:
        - namespace1
    # Update the config configmap whenever config.yaml changes
    config/prow/config.yaml:
      name: config
    # Update the plugin configmap whenever plugins.yaml changes
    config/prow/plugins.yaml:
      name: plugin
    # Update the `this` or/and `that` key in the `data` configmap whenever `data.yaml` or/and `other-data.yaml` changes
    some/data.yaml:
      name: data
      key: this
    some/other-data.yaml:
      name: data
      key: that
    # Update the fejtaverse configmap whenever any `.yaml` file under `fejtaverse` changes
    fejtaverse/**/*.yaml:
      name: fejtaverse

3.6 - External Plugins

This is a placeholder page. Some contents needs to be filled.

3.6.1 - cherrypicker

Cherrypicker is an external prow plugin that can also run as a standalone bot. It automates cherry-picking merged PRs into different branches. Cherrypicks are triggered from either comments or labels in GitHub PRs that need to be cherrypicked.

For comments:

/cherrypick release-1.10

The above comment will result in opening a new PR against the release-1.10 branch once the PR where the comment was made gets merged or is already merged.

To use label, you need to apply labels that contain the name of the branch in the form:

cherrypick/XXX

where XXX is the name of the branch.

The bot uses its own fork to push patches that need to be cherry-picked and opens PRs out of those patches. The fork is created automatically by the bot so there is no need to set it up manually.

Required scopes for the oauth token that need to be used are read:org and repo.

3.7 - Deprecated Components

3.7.1 - cm2kc (clustermap to kubeconfig)

Description

cm2kc is a CLI tool used to convert a clustermap file to a kubeconfig file.

Usage

go run ./cmd/cm2kc <options>

The following is a list of supported options for cm2kc:

  -i, --input string    Input clustermap file. (default "/dev/stdin")
  -o, --output string   Output kubeconfig file. (default "/dev/stdout")

Examples

Add a kubeconfig file in a secret: `kubeconfig` from a clustermap file in another secret: `build-cluster` for context: `my-context`

The following command will:

Get a clustermap formatted secret: build-cluster in key: cluster for context: my-context.
Base64 decode the secret.
Convert the clustermap data to a kubeconfig format.
Create a kubeconfig formatted secret: kubeconfig in key: config for context: my-context from the converted data.

kubectl --context=my-context get secrets build-cluster -o jsonpath='{.data.cluster}' |
  base64 -d |
  go run ./cmd/cm2kc |
  kubectl --context=my-context create secret generic kubeconfig --from-file=config=/dev/stdin

Lastly, to begin using this in Prow, update the volume mount and replace --build-cluster with --kubeconfig in the deployment of each relevant Prow component (e.g. crier, deck, plank, and sinker).

Create a kubeconfig file at path `/path/to/kubeconfig.yaml` from a clustermap file at path `/path/to/clustermap.yaml`

Ensure the clustermap file exists at the specified --input path:

# /path/to/clustermap.yaml

default:
  clientCertificate: fake-default-client-cert
  clientKey: fake-default-client-key
  clusterCaCertificate: fake-default-ca-cert
  endpoint: https://1.2.3.4
build:
  clientCertificate: fake-build-client-cert
  clientKey: fake-build-client-key
  clusterCaCertificate: fake-build-ca-cert
  endpoint: https://5.6.7.8

Execute cm2kc specifying an --input path to the clustermap file and an --output path to the desired location of the generated kubeconfig file:

go run ./cmd/cm2kc --input=/path/to/clustermap.yaml --output=/path/to/kubeconfig.yaml

The following kubeconfig file will be created at the specified --output path:

# /path/to/kubeconfig.yaml

apiVersion: v1
clusters:
- name: default
  cluster:
    certificate-authority-data: fake-default-ca-cert
    server: https://1.2.3.4
- name: build
  cluster:
    certificate-authority-data: fake-build-ca-cert
    server: https://5.6.7.8
contexts:
- name: default
  context:
    cluster: default
    user: default
- name: build
  context:
    cluster: build
    user: build
current-context: default
kind: Config
preferences: {}
users:
- name: default
  user:
    client-certificate-data: fake-default-ca-cert
    client-key-data: fake-default-ca-cert
- name: build
  user:
    client-certificate-data: fake-build-ca-cert
    client-key-data: fake-build-ca-cert

3.7.2 - Phaino

Run prowjobs on your local workstation with phaino.

Plato believed that ideas and forms are the ultimate truth, whereas we only see the imperfect physical appearances of those idea.

He linkens this in his Allegory of the Cave to someone living in a cave who can only see the shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire.

Phaino is act of making those imperfect shadows appear.

Phaino shares a prefix with Pharos, meaning lighthouse and in particular the ancient one in Alexandria.

Usage

Usage:

# Use a job from deck
go run ./cmd/phaino $URL # or /path/to/prowjob.yaml
# Use mkpj to create the job
go run ./cmd/mkpj --config-path=/path/to/prow/config.yaml --job-config-path=/path/to/prow/job/configs --job=foo > /tmp/foo
go run ./cmd/phaino /tmp/foo

Phaino is an interactive utility; it will prompt you for a local copy of any secrets or volumes that the Prow Job may require.

Common options

--grace=5m controls how long to wait for interrupted jobs before terminating
--print the command that runs each job without running it
--privileged jobs are allowed to run instead of rejected
--timeout=10m controls how long to allow jobs to run before interrupting them
--code-mount-path=/go changes the path where code is mounted in the container
--skip-volume-mounts=volume1,volume2 includes the unwanted volume mounts that are defined in the job spec
--extra-volume-mounts=/go/src/sigs.k8s.io/prow=/Users/xyz/k8s-test-infra includes the extra volume mounts needed for the container. Key is the mount path and value is the local path
--skip-envs=env1,env2 includes the unwanted env vars that are defined in the job spec
--extra-envs=env1=val1,env2=val2 includes the extra env vars needed for the container
--use-local-gcloud-credentials controls whether to use the same gcloud credentials as local or not
--use-local-kubeconfig controls whether to use the same kubeconfig as local or not

Common options usage scenarios

Phaino is smart at prompting for where repo is located, volume mounts etc., if it’s desired to save the prompts, use the following tricks instead:

If the repo needs to be cloned under GOPATH, use:

--code-mount-path==/whatever/go/src # Controls where source code is mounted in container
--extra-volume-mounts=/whatever/go/src/sigs.k8s.io/prow=/Users/xyz/k8s-test-infra

If job requires mounting kubeconfig, assume the mount is named kubeconfig,use:
```
--use-local-kubeconfig
--skip-volume-mounts=kubeconfig
```
If job requires mounting gcloud default credentials, assume the mount is named service-account,use:
```
--use-local-gcloud-credentials
--skip-volume-mounts=service-account
```

If job requires mounting something else like name:foo; mountPath: /bar,use:

--extra-volume-mounts=/bar=/Users/xyz/local/bar
--skip-volume-mounts=foo

If job requires env vars,use:
```
--extra-envs=env1=val1,env2=val2
```

See go run ./cmd/phaino --help for full option list.

Usage examples

URL example

Go to your deck deployment
Pick a job and click the rerun icon on the left
Copy the URL (something like https://prow.k8s.io/rerun?prowjob=d08f1ca5-5d63-11e9-ab62-0a580a6c1281)
Paste it as a phaino arg
- go run ./cmd/phaino https://prow.k8s.io/rerun?prowjob=d08f1ca5-5d63-11e9-ab62-0a580a6c1281
- Alternatively go run ./cmd/phaino <(curl $URL)

Configuration example

Use mkpj to create the job and pipe this to phaino

For prow.k8s.io jobs use //config:mkpj

go run ./config:mkpj --job=pull-test-infra-bazel > /tmp/foo
go run ./cmd/phaino /tmp/foo

Other deployments will need to clone that rule and/or pass in extra flags:

go run ./cmd/mkpj --config-path=/my/config.yaml --job=my-job
go run ./cmd/phaino /tmp/foo

3.7.3 - Plank

Plank is the controller that manages the job execution and lifecycle for jobs running in k8s.

Usage

go run ./cmd/prow-controller-manager --help

Configuration

GCS and S3 are supported as the job log storage.

# config.yaml

plank:
  # used to link to job results for decorated jobs (with pod utilities)
  job_url_prefix_config:
    '*': https://<domain>/view
  # used to link to job results for non decorated jobs (without pod utilities)
  job_url_template: 'https://<domain>/view/<bucket-name>/pr-logs/pull/{{.Spec.Refs.Repo}}/{{with index .Spec.Refs.Pulls 0}}{{.Number}}{{end}}/{{.Spec.Job}}/{{.Status.BuildID}}'
  report_template: '[Full PR test history](https://<domain>/pr-history?org={{.Spec.Refs.Org}}&repo={{.Spec.Refs.Repo}}&pr={{with index .Spec.Refs.Pulls 0}}{{.Number}}{{end}})'
  default_decoration_config_entries:
  # All entries that match a job are used, later entries override previous values.
  # Omission of 'repo' and 'cluster' fields makes this entry match all jobs.
  - config:
      timeout: 4h
      grace_period: 15s
      utility_images: # pull specs for container images used to construct job pods
        clonerefs: gcr.io/k8s-prow/clonerefs:v20190221-d14461a
        initupload: gcr.io/k8s-prow/initupload:v20190221-d14461a
        entrypoint: gcr.io/k8s-prow/entrypoint:v20190221-d14461a
        sidecar: gcr.io/k8s-prow/sidecar:v20190221-d14461a
      gcs_configuration: # configuration for uploading job results to GCS
        bucket: <bucket-name> or s3://<bucket-name>
        path_strategy: explicit # or `legacy`, `single`
        default_org: <github-org> # should not need this if `strategy` is set to explicit
        default_repo: <github-repo> # should not need this if `strategy` is set to explicit
      gcs_credentials_secret: <secret-name> # the name of the secret that stores cloud provider credentials
      ssh_key_secrets:
        - ssh-secret # name of the secret that stores the bot's ssh keys for GitHub, doesn't matter what the key of the map is and it will just uses the values
  - repo: "^org/" # some regexp to match against <org/repo>
    config:
      timeout:2h
  - cluster: "-trusted$" #some regexp to match against the cluster name
    config:
      # example override to use k8s SA with GCP workload identity rather than
      # a GCP service account key file.
      gcs_credentials_secret: ""

3.8 - Undocumented Components

3.8.1 - admission

This is a placeholder page. Some contents needs to be filled.

3.8.2 - grandmatriarch

This is a placeholder page. Some contents needs to be filled.

3.8.3 - pipeline

This is a placeholder page. Some contents needs to be filled.

4 - GKE Build Clusters

Sometimes you might want to run all of your jobs in a GKE cluster that is separate from Prow (perhaps running in your own GCP project). What you need is a dedicated “build cluster”.

Note: This page discusses build clusters that use GKE. Technically speaking, a build cluster could be any Kubernetes cluster (not just GKE) because the only thing Prow needs is the ability to authenticate as a Kubernetes Service Account with cluster-admin role permissions to the build cluster.

Overview

By default Prow will schedule jobs in the cluster that maps to a kubeconfig alias named “default” (imagine running kubectl config set-context "default" --cluster=<CLUSTER_CONTEXT>, where the <CLUSTER_CONTEXT> could be any cluster). So the jobs can be scheduled either in the same cluster that is hosting Prow itself, or a different one. For example the “default” cluster in https://prow.k8s.io is the build cluster located in the k8s-prow-builds GCP project and not the k8s-prow GCP project where the Prow services actually run.

Setting up a separate build cluster will allow you to schedule jobs into a different Kubernetes cluster altogether. When everything’s set up, Prow’s component will schedule jobs into your build cluster (as shown in the Arhictecture diagram) instead of its own. This way, you can “bring your own build cluster” to Prow to make it scale however you see fit.

For convenience we use the terms KSA and GSA, where KSA means Kubernetes Service Account and GSA means GCP (IAM) Service Account.

Running the build cluster setup script

The Prow source repo comes with a default create-build-cluster.sh script which allows you to create a new GKE cluster with the intent of giving the Kubernetes Prow instance access to it. Because there are different Prow instances and each instance has its own default settings (esp. for permissions), each instance has its own such script, forked from the default one. For example, Google’s OSS Prow instance has its own script here.

The scripts all have prompts and ask you various questions to set everything up. If everything proceeds smoothly, then there’s nothing more for you to do (you’re ready to start writing Prow jobs that use your cluster). Below is a discussion of the overall process to demystify what goes on behind the scenes.

How does Prow actually use your build cluster?

There are two requirements:

Prow must be able to schedule jobs into your build cluster.
The jobs themselves must be able to upload artifacts to the GCS bucket used by Deck, in order to report job status (e.g., “passing” or “failing”).

We look at both requirements below.

Let Prow schedule your jobs into your build cluster

Prow is a Kubernetes cluster. So is your build cluster. In order for Prow to schedule jobs (i.e., create Kubernetes pods) into your build cluster, it must be able to authenticate as a KSA¹ defined in your build cluster that has a cluster-admin Kubernetes role. This way, the prow-controller-manager component can freely create, update, and delete jobs (pods) in your build cluster as necessary. The item “KSA A” in the diagram below is this service account.

In order for Prow’s components to authenticate as the cluster-admin KSA in your build cluster, they use a token. You can think of this token simply as a password, that when provided to your build cluster’s API server along with the KSA name, grants authentication as this very same KSA.

The question now turns to how we can generate this token. This can be done manually, but the token cannot be valid for longer than 2 days for security reasons (a GKE restriction), and must be rotated regularly. Fortunately, there is a tool called gencred that automates the generation of the token. We just need to have it be run periodically — and so we need to add a Prow job that regularly invokes gencred.

Once the token is generated, we can store it in the GCP Secret Manager for the GCP project that is running Prow for safekeeping. Then we have to mount this token into the various Prow components that need it; this one-way sync is performed by the kubernetes-external-secrets component. The Prow components' configurations don’t have to be updated though, because your build cluster’s token is combined with other secrets into a composite file.

Let your jobs report their status to GCS

Your jobs in your build cluster must have GCS access in order to upload critical job metadata, such as a finished.json file to indicate the status of your job (whether it passed or failed). The GCS bucket location usually depends on how the Prow instance is configured. Currently they are:

Prow instance	GCS bucket
https://prow.k8s.io/	gs://kubernetes-jenkins (source)
https://oss.gprow.dev/	gs://oss-prow (source)

You can also configure this to be a different bucket (example).

In order to grant your job access to a GCS bucket, we’ll use Workload Identity.

The basic steps to get GCS uploads working are:

Create KSA B
Create GSA C
Bind KSA B in the test-pods namespace to GSA C with Workload Identity.
Assign KSA B a Workload Identity annotation so that GKE knows to automatically run the “impersonate as GSA C” process when the prowjob Kubernetes pod starts in your build cluster.

Below is a diagram of all critical pieces between your build cluster and Prow, once everything is set up and working.

flowchart TD

    classDef yellow fill:#ff0
    classDef cyan fill:#0ff
    classDef pink fill:#f99
    classDef clear fill:#00000000,stroke-width:0px
    style GCS fill:#cca
    style GSA_C fill:#ae0
    style KES_pod fill:#0ff
    style KSA_A_token fill:#f90
    style Kubeconfig_secret fill:#f90
    style PCM_pod fill:#0ff
    style gencred_prowjob_pod fill:#ff0
    style other_pods fill:#0ff
    style prowjob_pod fill:#ff0
    style testpods_namespace fill:#f1cab
    style your_gcp_project fill:#00000000
    style another_gcp_project fill:#00000000
    
    
    subgraph Prow["GKE K8S CLUSTER (PROW)"]
      subgraph default_namespace["'default' namespace, where all Prow components run"]
        PCM_pod["prow-controller-manager\n(Prow component)"]
        KES_pod["kubernetes-external-secrets\n(Prow component)"]
        other_pods["Other Prow components"]
        Kubeconfig_secret["Kubeconfig secret"]
        %%caption1["(This is where Prow services run.)"]:::clear
      end
      subgraph test_pods_namespace["'test-pods' namespace, aka trusted build cluster"]
        gencred_prowjob_pod["gencred prowjob"]
      end
      subgraph GCP Secret Manager
        KSA_A_token["Secret (2-day) token for <b>KSA A</b>"]
      end
    end
    
    subgraph your_gcp_project["Your GCP Project"]
      subgraph Build Cluster["GKE K8S CLUSTER (YOUR BUILD CLUSTER)"]
        subgraph testpods_namespace["'test-pods' K8s namespace"]
          prowjob_pod["K8s Pod\n(prowjob)\n\nRuns as <b>KSA B</b>, bound to <b>GSA C</b> via\nWorkload Identity"]
          KSA_B["<b>KSA B</b>"]
        end
        KSA_A["<b>KSA A</b>\n\nHas cluster-admin access\nfor your cluster"]
      end
      subgraph GCP IAM
        GSA_C["<b>GSA C</b>"]
      end
    end

    subgraph another_gcp_project["Another GCP Project"]
      GCS
    end

    PCM_pod ===> |"Schedules prowjob pod via\nauthorization as <b>KSA A</b>\nusing a <b>kubectl apply ...</b> equivalent"| prowjob_pod
    gencred_prowjob_pod --> |"Creates\n(if one does not exist)"| KSA_A
    gencred_prowjob_pod --> |"Refreshes\n(creates a new one)"| KSA_A_token

    prowjob_pod -.-> |"Runs as"| KSA_B 
    prowjob_pod --> |"Uploads via\nauthorization as <b>GSA C</b>"| GCS["<span style='font-size: 30px'>GCS</span>"]
    prowjob_pod -.-> |"Impersonates via\nWorkload Identity"| GSA_C
    
    KES_pod --> |"Reads"| KSA_A_token 
    KES_pod --> |"Merges into"| Kubeconfig_secret
    Kubeconfig_secret --> |"Mounted into"| PCM_pod
    Kubeconfig_secret --> |"Mounted into"| other_pods

    GSA_C -.-> |"Has write access"| GCS

KSA is not a hard requirement; it’s just an easier way to generate a kubeconfig for authenticating with a build cluster. The other method is via creating a certificate. ↩︎

5 - Contribution Guidelines

How to contribute to the docs

Clearing out of Legacy Snapshot

Our docs have been migrated from the Prow folder inside the kubernetes/test-infra repository to the kubernetes-sigs/prow repository (the page you are reading is generated from kubernetes-sigs/prow). However, these migrated files have been placed under the Legacy Snapshot directory because they have not been vetted by the Prow team as being up-to-date. The original files have been frozen and can no longer be modified.

Our current top priority is to review docs under the Legacy Snapshot and to move them to a more appropriate section. Please contribute!

Updating existing docs

If you need to update an existing doc (that is, in kubernetes/test-infra/prow/.*\.md), you must find the corresponding file in Legacy Snapshot and move it to a more appropriate location.

Tooling

We use Hugo to format and generate our website, the Docsy theme for styling and site structure, and Netlify to manage the deployment of the site. Hugo is an open-source static site generator that provides us with templates, content organisation in a standard directory structure, and a website generation engine. You write the pages in Markdown (or HTML if you want), and Hugo wraps them up into a website.

Useful resources

Docsy user guide: All about Docsy (the Hugo theme used on this site).

6 - Metrics

Prometheus metrics that can be used for monitoring and alerting.

Prometheus Metrics

Some Prow components expose Prometheus metrics that can be used for monitoring and alerting. The following table describes the metrics that are currently available.

Component	Type	Metric	Labels	Description
Tide	Gauge	`pooledprs`	org, repo, branch	The number of PRs in each Tide pool.
	Gauge	`updatetime`	org, repo, branch	The last time each Tide pool was synced.
	Gauge	`syncdur`		The Tide sync controller loop duration.
	Gauge	`statusupdatedur`		The Tide status controller loop duration.
	Histogram	`merges`	org, repo, branch	A histogram of the number of PRs in each merge.
	Counter	`tidepoolerrors`	org, repo, branch	Count of Tide pool sync errors.
	Counter	`tidequeryresults`	query_index, org_shard, result	Count of Tide queries by query index, org shard, and result (success/error).
	Counter	`tidesyncheartbeat`	controller	Count of Tide syncs per controller.
Hook	Counter	`prow_webhook_counter`	event_type	The number of GitHub webhooks received by Prow.
Plank/Jenkins-Operator	Gauge	`prowjobs`	job_name, type, state	The number of ProwJobs.
Jenkins-Operator	Counter	`jenkins_requests`	verb, handler, code	The number of jenkins requests made by Prow.
	Counter	`jenkins_request_retries`		The number of jenkins request retries Prow has made.
	Histogram	`jenkins_request_latency`	verb, handler	A histogram of round trip times between Prow and Jenkins.
	Histogram	`resync_period_seconds`		A histogram of the jenkins controller loop duration.
Bugzilla	Histogram	`bugzilla_request_duration`	method, status	Bugzilla request duration by API path.
Sinker	Gauge	`sinker_pods_existing`		Number of the existing pods in each sinker cleaning.
	Gauge	`sinker_loop_duration_seconds`		Time used in each sinker cleaning.
	Gauge	`sinker_pods_removed`	reason	Number of pods removed in each sinker cleaning.
	Gauge	`sinker_pod_removal_errors`	reason	Number of errors which occurred in each sinker pod cleaning.
	Gauge	`sinker_prow_jobs_existing`		Number of the existing prow jobs in each sinker cleaning.
	Gauge	`sinker_prow_jobs_cleaned`	reason	Number of prow jobs cleaned in each sinker cleaning.
	Gauge	`sinker_prow_jobs_cleaning_errors`	reason	Number of errors which occurred in each sinker prow job cleaning.
Crier	Histogram	`crier_report_latency`	reporter	Histogram of time spent reporting, calculated by the time difference between job completion and end of reporting.
	Counter	`crier_reporting_results`	reporter, result	Count of successful and failed reporting attempts by reporter.
Flagutil	Counter	`kubernetes_failed_client_creations`	cluster	The number of clusters for which we failed to create a client.
Gerrit/Adapter	Counter	`gerrit_processing_results`	instance, repo, result	Count of change processing by instance, repo, and result.
	Histogram	`gerrit_trigger_latency`	instance	Histogram of seconds between triggering event and ProwJob creation time.
Gerrit/Client	Counter	`gerrit_query_results`	instance, repo, result	Count of Gerrit API queries by instance, repo, and result.
GitHub	Gauge	`github_user_info`	token_hash, login, email	Metadata about a user, tied to their token hash.
GitHub-Server	Counter	`prow_webhook_counter`	event_type	A counter of the webhooks made to prow.
	Counter	`prow_webhook_response_codes`	response_code	A counter of the different responses hook has responded to webhooks with.
	Histogram	`prow_plugin_handle_duration_seconds`	event_type, action, plugin, took_action	How long Prow took to handle an event by plugin, event type and action.
	Counter	`prow_plugin_handle_errors`	event_type, action, plugin, took_action	Prow errors handling an event by plugin, event type and action.
Jenkins	Counter	`jenkins_requests`	verb, handler, code	Number of Jenkins requests made from prow.
	Counter	`jenkins_request_retries`		Number of Jenkins request retries made from prow.
	Histogram	`jenkins_request_latency`	verb, handler	Time for a request to roundtrip between prow and Jenkins.
	Histogram	`resync_period_seconds`		Time the controller takes to complete one reconciliation loop.
Jira	Histogram	`jira_request_duration_seconds`	method, path, status
Kube	Gauge	`prowjobs`	job_namespace, job_name, type, state, org, repo, base_ref, cluster, retest	Number of prowjobs in the system.
	Counter	`prowjob_state_transitions`	job_namespace, job_name, type, state, org, repo, base_ref, cluster, retest	Number of prowjobs transitioning states.
Plugins	Gauge	`prow_configmap_size_bytes`	name, namespace	Size of data fields in ConfigMaps updated automatically by Prow in bytes.
Pubsub/Subscriber	Counter	`prow_pubsub_message_counter`	subscription	A counter of the webhooks made to prow.
	Counter	`prow_pubsub_error_counter`	subscription, error_type	A counter of the webhooks made to prow.
	Counter	`prow_pubsub_ack_counter`	subscription	A counter for message acked made to prow.
	Counter	`prow_pubsub_nack_counter`	subscription	A counter for message nacked made to prow.
	Counter	`prow_pubsub_response_codes`	response_code, subscription	A counter of the different responses server has responded to Push Events with.
Version	Gauge	`prow_version`		Prow Version.

Pushgateway and Proxy

To support metric collection from ephemeral tasks like request handling and to provide a single scrape endpoint, Prow’s prometheus metrics are pushed to a Prometheus pushgateway that is scraped instead of the metric source. A proxy is used to limit cluster external requests to GET requests since Prometheus doesn’t provide any form of authentication. The pushgateway and proxy deployment are defined in pushgateway_deployment.yaml.

Kubernetes Prow Metrics

Prometheus metrics from the Kubernetes Prow instance are used to create the graphs at http://monitoring.prow.k8s.io

7 - Building, Testing, and Updating Prow

This guide is directed at Prow developers and maintainers who want to build/test individual components or deploy changes to an existing Prow cluster. “Deploying Prow” is a better reference for deploying a new Prow cluster.

How to build and test Prow

You can build, test, and deploy Prow’s binaries, container images, and cluster resources.

Build locally with:

make build-images

Push to remote with

make push-images REGISTRY=<YOUR_REGISTRY>

Unit test with:

make test

Integration test with(more details):

./test/integration/integration-test.sh

Individual packages and components can be built and tested like:

go build ./cmd/hook
go test ./pkg/plugins/lgtm

(Note: deck depends on non-go static files, these were tested by integration tests, and for e2e test use runlocal if desired.)

How to test a plugin

If you are making changes to a Prow plugin you can test the new behavior by sending fake webhooks to hook with phony.

How to update the cluster

Any modifications to prow Go code will require redeploying the affected binaries. The process of doing so is streamlined, which is highly recommended to all prow instances:

Prow code change PR merged.
post-test-infra-push-prow is automatically triggered, can be found on prow.k8s.io, which pushes images to gcr.io/k8s-prow.
Periodic job ci-test-infra-autobump-prow runs every hour, looking for latest image tags from gcr.io/k8s-prow, and creates a PR (example) to let prow use the latest tag.
Once the periodic job is merged, post-test-infra-deploy-prow deploys the config changes from the PR above.

How to test a ProwJob

The best way to go about testing a new ProwJob depends on the job itself. If the job can be run locally that is typically the best way to initially test the job because local debugging is easier and safer than debugging in CI. See Running a ProwJob Locally below.

Actually running the job on Prow by merging the job config is the next step. Typically, new presubmit jobs are configured to skip_reporting to GitHub and may not be configured to automatically run on every PR with always_run: true. Once the job is stable these values can be changed to make the job run everywhere and become visible to users by posting results to GitHub (if desired). Changes to existing jobs can be trialed on canary jobs.

ProwJobs can also be manually triggered by generating a YAML ProwJob CRD with mkpj and deploying that directly to the Prow cluster, however this pattern is generally not recommended. It requires the use of direct prod cluster access, allows ProwJobs to run in prod without passing presubmit validation, and can result in malformed ProwJobs CRDs that can jam some of Prow’s core service components. See How to manually run a given job on Prow below if you need to do this.

Running a ProwJob Locally

Using pj-on-kind.sh

pj-on-kind.sh is a bash script that runs ProwJobs locally as pods in a Kind cluster. The script does the following:

Installs mkpj, mkpod, and Kind if they are not found in the path. A Kind cluster named mkpod is created if one does not already exist.
Uses mkpj to generate a YAML ProwJob CRD given job name, config, and git refs (if applicable).
Uses mkpod to generate a YAML Pod resource from the ProwJob CRD. This Pod will be decorated with the pod utilities if needed and will exactly match what would be applied in prod with two exceptions:
1. The job logs, metadata, and artifacts will be copied to disk rather than uploaded to GCS. By default these files are copied to /mnt/disks/prowjob-out/<job-name>/<build-id>/ on the host machine.
2. Any volume mounts may be substituted for emptyDir or hostPath volumes at the interactive prompt to replace dependencies that are only available in prod. NOTE! In order for hostPath volume sources to reach the host and not just the Kind “node” container, use paths under /mnt/disks/kind-node or set $NODE_DIR before the mkpod cluster is created.
Applies the Pod to the Kind cluster and starts watching it (interrupt whenever, this is for convenience). At this point the Pod will start running if configured correctly.

Once the Pod has been applied to the cluster you can wait for it to complete and output results to the output directory, or you can interact with it using kubectl by first running export KUBECONFIG="$(kind get kubeconfig-path --name=mkpod)".

Requirements: Go, Docker, and kubectl must be installed before using this script. The ProwJob must use agent: kubernetes (the default, runs ProwJobs as Pods).

pj-on-kind.sh for specific Prow instances

Each Prow instance can supply a preconfigured variant of pj-on-kind.sh that properly defaults the config file locations. Example for prow.istio.io. To test ProwJobs for the prow.k8s.io instance use config/pj-on-kind.sh.

Example

This command runs the ProwJob pull-test-infra-yamllint locally on Kind.

./pj-on-kind.sh pull-test-infra-yamllint

You may also need to set the CONFIG_PATH and JOB_CONFIG_PATH environmental variables:

CONFIG_PATH=$(realpath ../config/prow/config.yaml) JOB_CONFIG_PATH=$(realpath ../config/jobs/kubernetes/test-infra/test-infra-presubmits.yaml) ...

Modifying pj-on-kind.sh for special scenarios

This tool was written in bash so that it can be easily adjusted when debugging. In particular it should be easy to modify the main function to:

Add additional K8s resources to the cluster before running the Pod such as secrets, configmaps, or volumes.
Skip applying the pod.yaml to the Kind cluster to inspect it, modify it, or apply it to a real cluster instead of the mkpod Kind cluster. (Same for pj.yaml)

Debugging within a pj-on-kind.sh container

To point kubectl to the Kind cluster you will need to export the KUBECONFIG Env. The command to point this to the correct config is echoed in the pj-on-kind.sh logging. It will have the form:

export KUBECONFIG='/<path to user dir>/.kube/kind-config-mkpod'

After pointing to the correct master you will be able to drop into the container using kubectl exec -it <pod name> <bash/sh/etc>. **This pod will only last the lifecycle of the job, if you need more time to debug you might add a sleep within the job execution.

How to manually run a given job on Prow

If the normal job triggering mechanisms (/test foo comments, PR changes, PR merges, cron schedule) are not sufficient for your testing you can use mkpj to manually trigger new ProwJob runs. To manually trigger any ProwJob, run the following, specifying JOB_NAME:

For K8S Prow, you can trigger a job by running

go run ./config:mkpj --job=JOB_NAME

For your own prow instance:

go run sigs.k8s.io/prow/cmd/mkpj --job=JOB_NAME --config-path=path/to/config.yaml

Alternatively, if you have jobs defined in a separate job-config, you can specify the config by adding the flag --job-config-path=path/to/job/config.yaml.

This will print the ProwJob YAML to stdout. You may pipe it into kubectl. Depending on the job, you will need to specify more information such as PR number.

NOTE: It is dangerous to create ProwJobs from handcrafted YAML. Please use mkpj to generate ProwJob YAML.

8 - Deploying Prow

This document will walk you through deploying your own Prow instance to a new Kubernetes cluster. If you encounter difficulties, please open an issue so that we can make this process easier.

Prow runs in any kubernetes cluster. The guide below is focused on Google Kubernetes Engine but should work on any kubernetes distro with no/minimal changes.

GitHub App

First, you need to create a GitHub app. GitHub itself documents this. Initially, it is sufficient to set a dummy url for the Webhook. The exact set of permissions needed varies based on what functionality you use. Below is a minimum set of permissions needed. Please keep in mind that any changes to the permissions your app requests (both added and removed) require everyone to re-install it.

Repository permissions:

Actions: Read-Only (Only needed when using the merge automation tide)
Administration: Read-Only (Required to fetch teams and collaborators, Read & write needed when using branch protection automation)
Checks: Read-Only (Only needed when using the merge automation tide)
Contents: Read (Read & write needed when using the merge automation tide)
Issues: Read & write
Metadata: Read-Only
Pull Requests: Read & write
Projects: Admin when using the projects plugin, none otherwise
Commit statuses: Read & write

Organization permissions:

Members: Read-Only (Read & write when using peribolos)
Projects: Admin when using the projects plugin, none otherwise

In Subscribe to events select all events.

After you saved the app, click “Generate Private Key” on the bottom and save the private key together with the App ID in the top of the page.

Deploying prow

Prow runs in a kubernetes cluster, so first figure out which cluster you want to deploy prow into. If you already have a cluster created you can skip to the Create cluster role bindings step.

Create the cluster

You can use the GCP cloud console to set up a project and create a new Kubernetes Engine cluster.

I’m assuming that PROJECT and ZONE environment variables are set, if you are using GCP. Skip this step if you are using another service to host your Kubernetes cluster.

$ export PROJECT=your-project
$ export ZONE=us-west1-a

Run the following to create the cluster. This will also set up kubectl to point to the new cluster on GCP.

$ gcloud container --project "${PROJECT}" clusters create prow \
  --zone "${ZONE}" --machine-type n1-standard-4 --num-nodes 2

Create cluster role bindings

As of 1.8 Kubernetes uses Role-Based Access Control (“RBAC”) to drive authorization decisions, allowing cluster-admin to dynamically configure policies. To create cluster resources you need to grant a user cluster-admin role in all namespaces for the cluster.

For Prow on GCP, you can use the following command.

$ kubectl create clusterrolebinding cluster-admin-binding \
  --clusterrole cluster-admin --user $(gcloud config get-value account)

For Prow on other platforms, the following command will likely work.

$ kubectl create clusterrolebinding cluster-admin-binding-"${USER}" \
  --clusterrole=cluster-admin --user="${USER}"

On some platforms the USER variable may not map correctly to the user in-cluster. If you see an error of the following form, this is likely the case.

Error from server (Forbidden): error when creating
"config/prow/cluster/starter/starter-gcs.yaml": roles.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "<account>" is
forbidden: attempt to grant extra privileges:
[PolicyRule{Resources:["pods/log"], APIGroups:[""], Verbs:["get"]}
PolicyRule{Resources:["prowjobs"], APIGroups:["prow.k8s.io"], Verbs:["get"]}
APIGroups:["prow.k8s.io"], Verbs:["list"]}] user=&{<CLUSTER_USER>
[system:authenticated] map[]}...

Run the previous command substituting USER with CLUSTER_USER from the error message above to solve this issue.

$ kubectl create clusterrolebinding cluster-admin-binding-"<CLUSTER_USER>" \
  --clusterrole=cluster-admin --user="<CLUSTER_USER>"

There are relevant docs on Kubernetes Authentication that may help if neither of the above work.

Create the GitHub secrets

You will need two secrets to talk to GitHub. The hmac-token is the token that you give to GitHub for validating webhooks. Generate it using any reasonable randomness-generator, eg openssl rand -hex 20.

$ openssl rand -hex 20 > /path/to/hook/secret
$ kubectl create secret -n prow generic hmac-token --from-file=hmac=/path/to/hook/secret

Afterwards, edit your GitHub app and set Webhook secret to the value of /path/to/hook/secret.

The github-token is the RSA private key and app id you created above for the GitHub App.

kubectl create secret -n prow generic github-token --from-file=cert=/path/to/github/cert --from-literal=appid=<<The ID of your app>>

Update the sample manifest

There are three sample manifests to get you started:

starter-s3.yaml sets up a minio as blob storage for logs and is particularly well suited to quickly get something working. NOTE: this method requires 2 PVs of 100Gi each.
starter-gcs.yaml uses GCS as blob storage and requires additional configuration to set up the bucket and ServiceAccounts. See this for details.
starter-azure.yaml uses Azure as blob storage and requires MinIO deployment. See this for details.

Note: It will deploy prow in the prow namespace of the cluster.

Regardless of which object storage you choose, the below adjustments are always needed:

The GitHub app cert by replacing the $GITHUB_TOKEN string
The GitHub app id by replacing the $GITHUB_APP_ID string
The hmac token by replacing the $HMAC_TOKEN string
The domain by replacing the $PROW_HOST string
Optionally, you can update the cert-manager.io/cluster-issuer: annotation if you use cert-manager
Your GitHub organization(s) by replacing the $GITHUB_ORG string

Add the prow components to the cluster

First you need to create the ProwJob custom resource:

kubectl apply --server-side=true -f config/prow/cluster/prowjob-crd/prowjob_customresourcedefinition.yaml

Apply the manifest you edited above by executing one of the following three commands:

kubectl apply -f config/prow/cluster/starter/starter-s3.yaml
kubectl apply -f config/prow/cluster/starter/starter-gcs.yaml
kubectl apply -f config/prow/cluster/starter/starter-azure.yaml

Note that some of the values, such as $GITHUB_TOKEN, are sensitive and should not be checked in version control; instead, you can e.g. assign them to environments variables and substitute dynamically:

export GITHUB_TOKEN=<your GitHub token>
...
envsubst < starter-azure.yaml | kubectl apply -f -

After a moment, the cluster components will be running.

$ kubectl get pods -n prow
NAME                                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
crier-69b6bd8f48-6sg24                     1/1     Running   0          9m54s
deck-7f6867c46c-j7nnh                      1/1     Running   0          2m5s
deck-7f6867c46c-mkxzk                      1/1     Running   0          2m5s
ghproxy-fdd45dfb6-582fh                    1/1     Running   0          9m54s
hook-7cc4df66f7-r2qpl                      1/1     Running   1          9m53s
hook-7cc4df66f7-shnjq                      1/1     Running   1          9m53s
horologium-7976c7f597-ss86t                1/1     Running   0          9m53s
minio-d756b6477-d4w4k                      1/1     Running   0          9m53s
prow-controller-manager-657767bb69-5qzhp   1/1     Running   0          9m53s
sinker-8b645d469-jjw8r                     1/1     Running   0          9m53s
statusreconciler-669697d466-zqfsj          1/1     Running   0          3m11s
tide-65489c49b8-rpnn2                      1/1     Running   0          3m2s

Get ingress IP address

Find out your external address. It might take a couple of minutes for the IP to show up.

kubectl get ingress -n prow prow
NAME   CLASS    HOSTS                     ADDRESS               	PORTS     AGE
prow   <none>   prow.<<your-domain.com>>   an.ip.addr.ess          80, 443   22d

Go to that address in a web browser and verify that the “echo-test” job has a green check-mark next to it. At this point you have a prow cluster that is ready to start receiving GitHub events!

Add the webhook to GitHub

To set up the webhook, you have to go the GitHub UI and edit your app. Update the Webhook URL property to https://prow.<<your-domain.com>>/hook. Use the URL shown above when getting the Ingress and fill in the Webhook secret using the value in the hmac-token secret created earlier.

Install Prow for a GitHub organization or repo

To install Prow for an org or repo, go to your GitHub app -> Install app and select the organizations to install the app in. If you want to install the app in other accounts than the one that created it, you need to make it public. To do so, go to Advanced -> Make this GitHub app public. After it is public, everyone can install it (Prow will not do anything for orgs or repos it doesn’t have configuration for though).

Deploying with GitHub Enterprise

When using GitHub Enterprise (GHE), Prow must be configured slightly differently. It’s possible to run GHE with or without the api subdomain:

with the api subdomain the endpoints are:
- v3: https://api.<<github-hostname>>
- graphql: https://api.<<github-hostname>>/graphql
without the api subdomain the endpoints are:
- v3: https://<<github-hostname>>/api/v3
- graphql: https://<<github-hostname>>/api/graphql

Prow component configuration:

ghproxy:
- configure arg: --upstream=<<v3-endpoint>>
- the ghproxy will not be able to proxy graphql requests when GHE is not using the api subdomain (because it tries to use the wrong context path for graphql)
crier, deck, hook, status-reconciler, tide, prow-controller-manager:
- configure args:
  - --github-endpoint=http://ghproxy
  - --github-endpoint=<<v3-endpoint>>
  - with api subdomain:
    - --github-graphql-endpoint=http://ghproxy/graphql
  - without api subdomain:
    - --github-graphql-endpoint=<<graphql-endpoint>>
deck, hook, tide, prow-controller-manager:
- configure arg: --github-host=<<github-hostname>>

Prow global configuration (config.yaml):

configure github.link_url: "https://<<github-hostname>>"

ProwJob configuration:

ensure that clone_uri and path_alias are always set:
- clone_uri: https://<<github-hostname>>/<<org>>/<<repo>>.git
- path_alias: <<github-hostname>>/<<org>>/<<repo>>
it might be necessary to configure plank.default_decoration_config_entries[].ssh_host_fingerprints

Next Steps

You now have a working Prow cluster (Woohoo!), but it isn’t doing anything interesting yet. This section will help you complete any additional setup that your instance may need.

Configure an Azure blob storage

If you want to persist logs and output in Azure, you need to follow the steps below.

By default, Prow doesn’t support Azure blob storage for storing job metadata, logs, and artifacts. However, with MinIO it is possible to keep artifacts in Azure blob storage as one would in GCS or S3. MinIO Gateway adds Amazon S3 compatibility to Azure Blob Storage. As such, we can mimic S3 storage for Prow, while actually pushing artifacts to the Azure storage. To run MinIO in gateway mode with Azure being the backend storage, we need to pass the following arguments to MinIO deployment:

  args:
  - gateway # mode of MinIO
  - azure # storage provider
  - --console-address=:"<<CHANGE_ME_MINIO_CONSOLE_PORT>>" # predictable port number of the web console. E.g. 33333

In order to configure the Azure storage, follow the following steps:

create a storage account.
update MinIO deployment and s3-credential Secret with your Azure BlobStorage account name and key.
update MinIO deployment and minio-console with your desired port number for accessing its web-console. minio-console service is optional and only necessary if you plan to access MinIO web-console.
create the following containers in your Azure BlobStorage account where Prow will push various artifacts:
- prow-logs
- status-reconciler
- tide
apply starter-azure.yaml.

Configure a GCS bucket

If you want to persist logs and output in GCS, you need to follow the steps below.

When configuring Prow jobs to use the Pod utilities with decorate: true, job metadata, logs, and artifacts will be uploaded to a GCS bucket in order to persist results from tests and allow for the job overview page to load those results at a later point. In order to run these jobs, it is required to set up a GCS bucket for job outputs. If your Prow deployment is targeted at an open source community, it is strongly suggested to make this bucket world-readable.

In order to configure the bucket, follow the following steps:

provision a new service account for interaction with the bucket
create the bucket
(optionally) expose the bucket contents to the world
grant access to admin the bucket for the service account

Either use a Kubernetes service account bound to the GCP service account (recommended on GKE):
1. Create a Kubernetes service account in the namespace where jobs will run.
2. Bind the Kubernetes service account to the GCP service account.
3. edit the plank configuration for default_decoration_config_entries[].config.default_service_account_name to point to the Kubernetes service account.
OR use a GCP service account key file:
1. serialize a key for the service account
2. upload the key to a Secret under the service-account.json key
3. edit the plank configuration for default_decoration_config_entries[].config.gcs_credentials_secret to point to the Secret above

After downloading the gcloud tool and authenticating, the following collection of commands will execute the above steps for you:

You will need to change the bucket name from gs://your-bucket-name/ to a globally unique one and use that instead in starter-gcs.yaml too.

$ gcloud iam service-accounts create prow-gcs-publisher
$ identifier="$(gcloud iam service-accounts list --filter 'name:prow-gcs-publisher' --format 'value(email)')"
$ gsutil mb gs://your-bucket-name/ # step 2
$ gsutil iam ch allUsers:objectViewer gs://your-bucket-name # step 3
$ gsutil iam ch "serviceAccount:${identifier}:objectAdmin" gs://your-bucket-name # step 4
$ gcloud iam service-accounts keys create --iam-account "${identifier}" service-account.json # step 5
$ kubectl -n test-pods create secret generic gcs-credentials --from-file=service-account.json # step 6
$ kubectl -n prow create secret generic gcs-credentials --from-file=service-account.json # this secret is also needed by deployments in the prow namespace

Configure the version of plank’s utility images

Before we can update plank’s default_decoration_config_entries[] we’ll need to retrieve the version of plank. Check the deployment file or use the following:

$ kubectl get pod -n prow -l app=plank -o jsonpath='{.items[0].spec.containers[0].image}' | cut -d: -f2
v20191108-08fbf64ac

Then, we can use that tag to retrieve the corresponding utility images in default_decoration_config_entries[] in config.yaml:

For more information on how the pod utility images for prow are versioned see generic-autobumper and the autobump config used for prow.k8s.io

plank:
  default_decoration_config_entries:
  - config:
      utility_images: # using the tag we identified above
        clonerefs: "gcr.io/k8s-prow/clonerefs:v20191108-08fbf64ac"
        initupload: "gcr.io/k8s-prow/initupload:v20191108-08fbf64ac"
        entrypoint: "gcr.io/k8s-prow/entrypoint:v20191108-08fbf64ac"
        sidecar: "gcr.io/k8s-prow/sidecar:v20191108-08fbf64ac"
      gcs_configuration:
        bucket: prow-artifacts # the bucket we just made
        path_strategy: explicit
      gcs_credentials_secret: gcs-credentials # the secret we just made

Adding more jobs

There are two ways to configure jobs:

Using the inrepoconfig feature to configure jobs inside the repo under test
Using the static config by editing the config configmap, some samples below:

Add the following to config.yaml:

periodics:
- interval: 10m
  name: echo-test
  decorate: true
  spec:
    containers:
    - image: alpine
      command: ["/bin/date"]
postsubmits:
  YOUR_ORG/YOUR_REPO:
  - name: test-postsubmit
    decorate: true
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: alpine
        command: ["/bin/printenv"]
presubmits:
  YOUR_ORG/YOUR_REPO:
  - name: test-presubmit
    decorate: true
    always_run: true
    skip_report: true
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: alpine
        command: ["/bin/printenv"]

Again, run the following to test the files, replacing the paths as necessary:

$ go run ./cmd/checkconfig --plugin-config=path/to/plugins.yaml --config-path=path/to/config.yaml

Now run the following to update the configmap.

$ kubectl create configmap -n prow config \
  --from-file=config.yaml=path/to/config.yaml --dry-run=server -o yaml | kubectl replace configmap -n prow config -f -

We create a make rule:

update-config: get-cluster-credentials
    kubectl create configmap -n prow config --from-file=config.yaml=config.yaml --dry-run=server -o yaml | kubectl replace configmap -n prow config -f -

Presubmits and postsubmits are triggered by the trigger plugin. Be sure to enable that plugin by adding it to the list you created in the last section.

Now when you open a PR it will automatically run the presubmit that you added to this file. You can see it on your prow dashboard. Once you are happy that it is stable, switch skip_report in the above config.yaml to false. Then, it will post a status on the PR. When you make a change to the config and push it with make update-config, you do not need to redeploy any of your cluster components. They will pick up the change within a few minutes.

When you push or merge a new change to the git repo, the postsubmit job will run.

For more information on the job environment, see jobs.md

Run test pods in different clusters

You may choose to run test pods in a separate cluster entirely. This is a good practice to keep testing isolated from Prow’s service components and secrets. It can also be used to furcate job execution to different clusters. One can use a Kubernetes kubeconfig file (i.e. Config object) to instruct Prow components to use the build cluster(s). All contexts in kubeconfig are used as build clusters and the InClusterConfig (or current-context) is the default.

NOTE: See the create-build-cluster.sh script to help you quickly create and register a GKE cluster as a build cluster for a Prow instance. Continue reading for information about registering a build cluster by hand.

Create a secret containing a kubeconfig like this:

apiVersion: v1
clusters:
- name: default
  cluster:
    certificate-authority-data: fake-ca-data-default
    server: https://1.2.3.4
- name: other
  cluster:
    certificate-authority-data: fake-ca-data-other
    server: https://5.6.7.8
contexts:
- name: default
  context:
    cluster: default
    user: default
- name: other
  context:
    cluster: other
    user: other
current-context: default
kind: Config
preferences: {}
users:
- name: default
  user:
    token: fake-token-default
- name: other
  user:
    token: fake-token-other

Use gencred to create the kubeconfig file (and credentials) for accessing the cluster(s):

NOTE: gencred will merge new entries to the specified output file on successive invocations by default .

Create a default cluster context (if one does not already exist):

NOTE: If executing gencred like below, ensure --output is an absolute path.

$ go run ./gencred \
  --context=<kube-context> \
  --name=default \
  --output=/tmp/kubeconfig.yaml \
  --serviceaccount

Create one or more build cluster contexts:

NOTE: the current-context of the existing kubeconfig will be preserved.

$ go run ./gencred \
  --context=<kube-context> \
  --name=other \
  --output=/tmp/kubeconfig.yaml \
  --serviceaccount

Create a secret containing the kubeconfig.yaml in the cluster:

$ kubectl --context=<kube-context> create secret generic kubeconfig --from-file=config=/tmp/kubeconfig.yaml

Mount this secret into the prow components that need it (at minimum: plank, sinker and deck) and set the --kubeconfig flag to the location you mount it at. For instance, you will need to merge the following into the plank deployment:

spec:
  containers:
  - name: plank
    args:
    - --kubeconfig=/etc/kubeconfig/config # basename matches --from-file key
    volumeMounts:
    - name: kubeconfig
      mountPath: /etc/kubeconfig
      readOnly: true
  volumes:
  - name: kubeconfig
    secret:
      defaultMode: 0644
      secretName: kubeconfig # example above contains a `config` key

Configure jobs to use the non-default cluster with the cluster: field. The above example kubeconfig.yaml defines two clusters: default and other to schedule jobs, which we can use as follows:

periodics:
- name: cluster-unspecified
  # cluster:
  interval: 10m
  decorate: true
  spec:
    containers:
    - image: alpine
      command: ["/bin/date"]
- name: cluster-default
  cluster: default
  interval: 10m
  decorate: true
  spec:
    containers:
    - image: alpine
      command: ["/bin/date"]
- name: cluster-other
  cluster: other
  interval: 10m
  decorate: true
  spec:
    containers:
    - image: alpine
      command: ["/bin/date"]

This results in:

The cluster-unspecified and cluster-default jobs run in the default cluster.
The cluster-other job runs in the other cluster.

See gencred for more details about how to create/update kubeconfig.yaml.

Enable merge automation using Tide

PRs satisfying a set of predefined criteria can be configured to be automatically merged by Tide.

Tide can be enabled by modifying config.yaml. See how to configure tide for more details.

Set up GitHub OAuth

GitHub Oauth is required for PR Status and for the rerun button on Prow Status. To enable these features, follow the instructions in How to setup GitHub Oauth.

Configure SSL

Use cert-manager for automatic LetsEncrypt integration. If you already have a cert then follow the official docs to set up HTTPS termination. Promote your ingress IP to static IP. On GKE, run:

$ gcloud compute addresses create [ADDRESS_NAME] --addresses [IP_ADDRESS] --region [REGION]

Point the DNS record for your domain to point at that ingress IP. The convention for naming is prow.org.io, but of course that’s not a requirement.

Then, install cert-manager as described in its readme. You don’t need to run it in a separate namespace.

9 - Developing and Contributing to Prow

Contributing

Please consider upstreaming any changes or additions you make! Contributions in any form (issues, pull requests, even constructive comments in discussions) are more than welcome! You can develop in-tree for more help and review, or out-of-tree if you need to for whatever reason. If you upstream a new feature or a change that impacts the default behavior of Prow, consider adding an announcement about it and dropping an email at the sig-testing mailing list.

New Contributors should search for issues in kubernetes-sigs/prow with the help-wanted and/or good first issue labels. (Query link). Before starting work please ensure that the issue is still active and then provide a short design overview of your planned solution. Also reach out on the Kubernetes slack in the sig-testing channel.

Prow Integration Points

There are a number of ways that you can write code for Prow or integrate existing code with Prow.

Plugins

Prow plugins are sub-components of the hook binary that register event handlers for various types of GitHub events. Plugin event handlers are provided a PluginClient that provides access to a suite of clients and agents for configuration, ProwJobs, GitHub, git, OWNERS file, Slack, and more.

How to add new plugins

Add a new package under plugins with a method satisfying one of the handler types in plugins. In that package’s init function, call plugins.Register*Handler(name, handler). Then, in hook/plugins.go, add an empty import so that your plugin is included. If you forget this step then a unit test will fail when you try to add it to plugins.yaml. Don’t add a brand new plugin to the main kubernetes/kubernetes repo right away, start with somewhere smaller and make sure it is well-behaved.

The lgtm plugin is a good place to start if you’re looking for an example plugin to mimic.

External plugins

For even more flexibility, anything that receives GitHub webhooks can be configured to be forwarded webhooks as an external plugin. This allows in-cluster or out of cluster plugins and forwarding to other bots or infrastructure.

Cluster Deployments

Additional cluster components can use the informer framework for ProwJobs in order to react to job creation, update, and deletion. This can be used to implement additional job execution controllers for executing job with different agents. For example, jenkins-operator executes jobs on jenkins, plank uses kubernetes pods, and build uses the build CRD. The informer framework can also be used to react to job completion or update in order to create an alternative job reporting mechanism.

Artifact Viewers

Spyglass artifact viewers allow for custom display of ProwJob artifacts that match a certain file regexp. Existing viewers display logs, metadata, and structured junit results.

ProwJobs

ProwJobs themselves are often a sufficient integration point if you just need to execute a task on a schedule or in reaction to code changes.

Exposed Data

If you just need some data from Prow you may be able to get it from the JSON exposed by Prow’s front end deck, or from Prometheus metrics.

Building, Testing, and Deploying

You can build, test, and deploy Prow’s binaries, container images, and cluster resources. See “Deploying Prow” for initially deploying Prow and “Building, Testing, and Updating Prow” for iterating on an existing deployment.

10 - Getting more out of Prow

If you want more functionality from your Prow instance this guide is for you. It primarily links to other resources that catalogue existing components and features.

Use more Prow components and plugins

Prow has a number of optional cluster components and a suite of plugins for hook that provide all sorts of automation. Check out the Components for a list of cluster components and the Plugins for information about available plugins.

Consume Prometheus metrics

Some Prow components expose prometheus metrics that can be used for monitoring, alerting, and pretty graphs. You can find details in the Metrics document.

Make Prow update and deploy itself

You can easily make your Prow instance automatically update itself when changes are made to its component’s kubernetes resource files. This is achieved with a postsubmit job that kubectl applys the resource files whenever they are changed (based on a run_if_changed or skip_if_only_changed regexp). In order to kubectl apply to the cluster, the job will need to supply credentials (e.g. a kubeconfig file or GCP service account key-file). Since this job requires priviledged credentials to deploy to the cluster, it is important that it is run in a separate build cluster that is isolated from all presubmit jobs. See the documentation about separate build clusters for details. An example of such a job can be found here. Once you have a postsubmit deploy job, any changes to Prow component files are automatically applied to the cluster when the changes merge. In order to ensure that all changes to production are properly approved, you can use OWNERS files with the approve plugin and Tide.

With the help of the Prow Autobump utility you can easily create commits that update all references to Prow images to the latest image version that has been vetted by the https://prow.k8s.io instance. If your Prow component resource files live in GitHub, this utility can even automatically create/update a Pull Request that includes these changes. This works great when run as a periodic job since it will maintain a single open PR that is periodically updated to reference the most recent upstream version. See the config used to bump prow.k8s.io for an example

Combining a postsubmit deploy job with a periodic job that runs the Prow Autobump utility allows Prow to be updated to the latest version by simply merging the automatically created Pull Request (or letting Tide merge it after it has been approved).

Deploy config changes automatically

Prow can also automatically upload changes to files that correspond to Kubernetes ConfigMaps. This includes its own config, plugins and job-config config maps. Take a look at the updateconfig plugin and config-bootstrapper for more details. Both of these tools share the updateconfig plugin’s plugin configuration. The plugin provides slightly better GitHub integration and is simpler to enable, but the config-bootstrapper is more flexible. It can be run in a postsubmit job to provide config upload on non-GitHub Prow instances or run after custom config generation is executed.

Use other tools with Prow

If you find that your GitHub bot is running low on API tokens consider using ghproxy to cache requests to GitHub and take advantage of the strange re-validation rules that allow for additional API token savings.
Testgrid provides a highly configurable visual overview of test results and can be configured to send alerts for failing or stale results. Testgrid is in the process of being open sourced, but until it has completely made the switch OSS users will need to use the https://testgrid.k8s.io instance that is managed by the GKE-Engprod team.
Kind lets you run an entire Kubernetes cluster in a container. This makes it fast and easy for ProwJobs to test anything that runs on Kubernetes (or Kubernetes itself).
label_sync maintains GitHub labels across orgs and repos based on yaml configuration.

Handle scale

If your Prow instance operates on a lot of GitHub repos or runs lots of jobs you should review the “Scaling Prow” guide for tips and best practices.

Private Front end

If you want to create a private Deck instnace that contains a subset of prowjobs, you should review the “Private Deck” guide.

11 - GitHub API Library

This GitHub API library is used by multiple parts of Prow. It uses both v3 and v4 of GitHub’s API. It is subject to change as needed without notice, but you can reuse and extend it within this repository.

Its primary component is client.go, a GitHub client that sends and receives API calls.

Recommended Usage

Instantiation

An application that takes flags may want to set GitHub flags, such as a proxy endpoint. To do that, GitHubOptions has a method that returns a GitHub client.

If you’re not using flags, you can instantiate a client with the NewClient and NewClientWithFields methods

Interfacing a Subset of Client

This client has a lot of functions listed in the interfaces of client.go. Further, these interfaces may change at any time. To avoid having to extend the entire interface, we recommend writing a local interface that uses the functionality you need.

For example, if you only need to get and edit issues, you might write an interface like the following:

type githubClient interface {
	GetIssue(org, repo string, number int) (*github.Issue, error)
	EditIssue(org, repo string, number int, issue *github.Issue) (*github.Issue, error)
}

The provided fake works like this; FakeClient doesn’t completely implement Client, but gives many common functions used in testing.

12 - ghProxy

ghProxy is a reverse proxy HTTP cache optimized for use with the GitHub API (https://api.github.com). It is essentially just a reverse proxy wrapper around ghCache with Prometheus instrumentation to monitor disk usage.

ghProxy is designed to reduce API token usage by allowing many components to share a single ghCache.

with Prow

While ghProxy can be used with any GitHub API client, it was designed for Prow. Prow’s GitHub client request throttling is optimized for use with ghProxy and doesn’t count requests that can be fulfilled with a cached response against the throttling limit.

Many Prow features (and soon components) require ghProxy in order to avoid rapidly consuming the API rate limit. Direct your Prow components that use the GitHub API (anything that requires the GH token secret) to use ghProxy and fall back to using the upstream API by adding the following flags:

--github-endpoint=http://ghproxy  # Replace this as needed to point to your ghProxy instance.
--github-endpoint=https://api.github.com

Deploying

A new container image is automatically built and published to gcr.io/k8s-prow/ghproxy whenever this directory is changed on the master branch. You can find a recent stable image tag and an example of how to deploy ghProxy to Kubernetes by checking out Prow’s ghProxy deployment.

Throttling algorithm

To prevent hitting GH API secondary rate limits, an additional ghProxy throttling algorithm can be configured and used. It is described here.

12.1 - ghCache

What?

ghCache is an HTTP cache optimized for caching responses from the GitHub API (https://api.github.com). Specifically, it has the following non-standard caching behavior:

Every cache hit is revalidated with a conditional HTTP request to GitHub regardless of cache entry freshness (TTL). The ‘Cache-Control’ header is ignored and overwritten to achieve this.
Concurrent requests for the same resource are coalesced and share a single request/response from GitHub instead of each request resulting in a corresponding upstream request and response.

ghCache also provides prometheus instrumentation to expose cache activity, request duration, and API token usage/savings.

Why?

The most important behavior of ghCache is the mandatory cache entry revalidation. While this property would cause most API caches to use tokens excessively, in the case of GitHub, we can actually save API tokens. This is because conditional requests for unchanged resources don’t cost any API tokens!!! See: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/overview/resources-in-the-rest-api#conditional-requests Free revalidation allows us to ensure that every request is satisfied with the most up to date resource without actually spending an API token unless the resource has been updated since we last checked it.

Request coalescing is beneficial for use cases in which the same resource is requested multiple times in rapid succession. Normally these requests would each result in an upstream request to GitHub, potentially costing API tokens, but with request coalescing at most one token is used. This particularly helps when many handlers react to the same event like in Prow’s hook component.

12.2 - Additional throttling algorithm

Motivation

An additional throttling algorithm was introduced to ghproxy to prevent secondary rate limiting issues (code 403) in large Prow installations, consisting of several organizations. Its purpose is to schedule incoming requests to adjust to the GitHub general rate-limiting guidelines.

Implementation

An incoming request is analyzed whether it is targeting GitHub API v3 or API v4. Separate queues are formed not only per API but also per organization if Prow installation is using GitHub Apps. If a user account in a form of the bot is used, every request coming from that user account is categorized as coming from the same organization. This is due to the fact, that such a request identifies not using AppID and organization name, but sha256 token hash.

There is a possibility to apply different throttling times per API version.

In the situation of a very high load, the algorithm prefers hitting secondary rate limits instead of forming a massive queue of throttled messages, thus default max waiting time in a queue is introduced. It is 30 seconds.

Flags

Flags --throttling-time-ms and --get-throttling-time-ms have to be set to a non-zero value, otherwise, additional throttling mechanism will be disabled.

All available flags:

throttling-time-ms enables a throttling mechanism which imposes time spacing between outgoing requests. Counted per organization. Has to be set together with --get-throttling-time-ms.
throttling-time-v4-ms is the same flag as above, but when set applies a separate time spacing for API v4.
get-throttling-time-ms allows setting different time spacing for API v3 GET requests.
throttling-max-delay-duration-seconds and throttling-max-delay-duration-v4-seconds allow setting max throttling time for respectively API v3 and API v4. The default value is 30. They are present to prefer hitting secondary rate limits, instead of forming massive queues of messages during periods of high load.
request-timeout refers to request timeout which applies also to paged requests. The default is 30 seconds. You may consider increasing it if throttling-max-delay-duration-seconds and throttling-max-delay-duration-v4-seconds are modified.

Example configuration

Args from ghproxy configuration YAML file:

...
          args:
          - --cache-dir=/cache
          - --cache-sizeGB=10
          - --legacy-disable-disk-cache-partitions-by-auth-header=false
          - --get-throttling-time-ms=300
          - --throttling-time-ms=900
          - --throttling-time-v4-ms=850
          - --throttling-max-delay-duration-seconds=45
          - --throttling-max-delay-duration-v4-seconds=110
          - --request-timeout=120
          - --concurrency=1000 # rely only on additional throttling algorithm and "disable" the previous solution
...

Metrics

Impact and the results after applying additional throttling can be consulted using two ghproxy Prometheus metrics:

github_request_duration to consult returned status codes across user agents and paths.
github_request_wait_duration_seconds to consult the status and waiting times of the requests handled by the throttling algorithm.

Both metrics are histogram type.

13 - Inrepoconfig

Inrepoconfig is a Prow feature that allows versioning Presubmit and Postsubmit jobs in the same repository that also holds the code (with a .prow directory or .prow.yaml file, akin to a .travis.yaml file). So instead of having all your jobs defined centrally, you could instead define the jobs in a distributed manner, coupled closely with the source code repos that they work on.

If enabled, Prow will use both the centrally-defined jobs and the ones defined in the code repositories. The latter ones are dynamically loaded on-demand.

Why use Inrepoconfig?

Pros

Coupling the jobs with the source code allows you to update both the job and the source code at the same time.

Cons

Inrepoconfig jobs are loaded on-demand, so it takes some extra setup to check that a misconfigured Inrepoconfig job is not blocking a PR. See “Config verification job” below.

Basic usage

To enable it, add the following to your Prow’s config.yaml:

in_repo_config:
  enabled:
    # The key can be one of "*" for "globally", "org" or "org/repo".
    # The narrowest match is used. Here the key is "kubernetes/kubernetes".
    kubernetes/kubernetes: true

  # Clusters must be allowed before they can be used. Here we allow the "default"
  # cluster globally. This setting also allows using "*" for "globally", "org" or "org/repo" as key.
  # All clusters that are allowed for the specific repo, its org or
  # globally can be used.
  allowed_clusters:
    "*": ["default"]

Additionally, Deck must be configured with a GitHub token if that is not already the case. To do so, the --github-token-path= flag must be set and point to a valid token file that has permissions to read all your repositories. Also, in order for Deck to serve content from storage locations not defined in the default locations or centrally-defined jobs, those buckets must be listed in deck.additional_allowed_buckets.

Config verification job

Afterwards, you need to add a config verification job to make sure people people get told about mistakes in their Inrepoconfig rather than the PR being stuck. It makes sense to define this job in the central repository rather than the code repository, so the checkconfig version used stays in sync with the Prow version used. It looks like this:

presubmits:
  kubernetes/kubernetes:
  - name: pull-kubernetes-validate-prow-yaml
    always_run: true
    decorate: true
    extra_refs:
    - org: kubernetes
      repo: test-infra
      base_ref: master
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: gcr.io/k8s-prow/checkconfig:v20221220-5c7fbe528a
        command:
          - /ko-app/checkconfig
        args:
        - --plugin-config=../test-infra/path/to/plugins.yaml
        - --config-path=../test-infra/path/to/config.yaml
        - --prow-yaml-repo-name=$(REPO_OWNER)/$(REPO_NAME)

After deploying the new config, the only step left is to create jobs. This is done by adding a file named .prow.yaml to the root of the repository that holds your code:

presubmits:
- name: pull-test-infra-yamllint
  always_run: true
  decorate: true
  spec:
    containers:
    - image: quay.io/kubermatic/yamllint:0.1
      command:
      - yamllint
      - -c
      - config/jobs/.yamllint.conf
      - config/jobs
      - config/prow/cluster

postsubmits:
- name: push-test-infra-yamllint
  always_run: true
  decorate: true
  spec:
    containers:
    - image: quay.io/kubermatic/yamllint:0.1
      command:
      - yamllint
      - -c
      - config/jobs/.yamllint.conf
      - config/jobs
      - config/prow/cluster

Multiple config files

It is possible also to use multiple config files with this same format under a .prow directory in the root of your repo. All the YAML files under the .prow directory will be read and merged together recursively. This makes it easier to handle big repos with a large number of jobs and allows fine-grained OWNERS control on them.

The .prow directory and .prow.yaml file are mutually exclusive; when both are present the .prow directory takes precedence.

For more detailed documentation of possible configuration parameters for jobs, please check the job documentation

Symlinks

Symlinks inside the .prow directory that point to outside the directory are not supported.

14 - Life of a Prow Job

NOTE: This document uses 5df7636b83cab54e248e550a31dbf1e4731197a6 (July 21, 2021) as a reference point for all code links.

Let’s pretend a user comments /test all on a Pull Request (PR). In response, GitHub posts this comment to Prow via a webhook. See examples for webhook payloads.

Prow’s Kubernetes cluster uses an ingress resource for terminating TLS, and routes traffic to the hook service resource, finally sending the traffic to the hook application, which is defined as a deployment:

This document describes the configuration for the ingress resource.
This document describes the configuration for the hook service.
This document defines the pods for the hook application.

The pods for hook run the hook executable. hook listens for incoming HTTP requests and translates them to “GitHub event objects”. For example, in the case of the /test all comment from above, hook builds an GenericCommentEvent. Afterwards, hook broadcasts these events to Prow Plugins.

Prow Plugins receive 2 objects:

a GitHub event object, and
a ClientAgent object.

The ClientAgent object contains the following clients:

GitHub client
Prow job client
Kubernetes client
BuildClusterCoreV1 clients
Git client
Slack client
Owners client
Bugzilla client
Jira client

These clients are initialized by hook, during start-up.

hook handles events by looking at X-GitHub-Event, a custom HTTP header. Afterwards, a ConfigAgent object, initialized during hook’s startup, selects plugins to handle events. See githubeventserver.go for more details, and check plugins.yaml for a list of plugins per repo.

Going back to the example, hook delivers an event that represents the /test all comment to the Trigger plugin. The Trigger plugin validates the PR before running tests. One such validation is, for instance, that the author is a member of the organization or that the PR is labeled ok-to-test. The function called handleGenericComment describes Trigger’s logic.

If all conditions are met (ok-to-test, the comment is not a bot comment, etc.), handleGenericComment determines which presubmit jobs to run. The initial list of presubmit jobs to run (before being filtered down to those that qualify for this particular comment), is retrieved with getPresubmits.

Next, for each presubmit we want to run, the trigger plugin talks to the Kubernetes API server and creates a ProwJob with the information from the PR comment. The ProwJob is primarily composed of the Spec and Status objects.

Pod details aside, a sample ProwJob might look like this:

apiVersion: prow.k8s.io/v1
kind: ProwJob
metadata:
  name: 32456927-35d9-11e7-8d95-0a580a6c1504
spec:
  job: pull-test-infra-bazel
  decorate: true
  pod_spec:
    containers:
    - image: gcr.io/k8s-staging-test-infra/bazelbuild:latest-test-infra
  refs:
    base_ref: master
    base_sha: 064678510782db5b382df478bb374aaa32e577ea
    org: kubernetes
    pulls:
    - author: ixdy
      number: 2716
      sha: dc32ccc9ea3672ccc523b7cbaa8b00360b4183cd
    repo: test-infra
  type: presubmit
status:
  startTime: 2017-05-10T23:34:22.567457715Z
  state: triggered

prow-controller-manager runs ProwJobs by launching them by creating a new Kubernetes pod. It knows how to schedule new ProwJobs onto the cluster, responding to changes in the ProwJob or cluster health.

When the ProwJob finishes (the containers in the pod have finished running), prow-controller-manager updates the ProwJob. crier reports back the status of the ProwJob back to the various external services like GitHub (e.g., as a green check-mark on the PR where the original /test all comment was made).

A day later, sinker notices that the job and pod are a day old and deletes them from the Kubernetes API server.

Here is a summary of the above:

User types in /test all as a comment into a GitHub PR.
GitHub sends a webhook (HTTP request) to Prow, to the prow.k8s.io/hook endpoint.
The request gets intercepted by the ingress.
The ingress routes the request to the hook service.
The hook service in turn routes traffic to the hook application, defined as a deployment.
The container routes traffic to the hook binary inside it.
hook binary parses and validates the HTTP request and creates a GitHub event object.
hook binary sends the GitHub event object (in this case GenericCommentEvent) to handleGenericCommentEvent.
handleGenericCommentEvent sends the data to be handled by the handleEvent.
The data in the comment gets sent from hook to one of its many plugins, one of which is trigger. (The pattern is that hook constructs objects to be consumed by various plugins.)
trigger determines which presubmit jobs to run (because it sees the /test command in /test all).
trigger creates a ProwJob object!
prow-controller-manager creates a pod to start the ProwJob.
When the ProwJob’s pod finishes, prow-controller-manager updates the ProwJob.
crier sees the updated ProwJob status and reports back to the GitHub PR (creating a new comment).
sinker cleans up the old pod from above and deletes it from the Kubernetes API server.

15 - Prow Configuration

Core Prow component configuration is managed by the config package and stored in the Config struct. If a configuration guide is available for a component it can be found in the “Components” directory. See jobs.md for a guide to configuring ProwJobs. Configuration for plugins is handled and stored separately. See the plugins package for details.

You can find a sample config with all possible options and a documentation of them here.

16 - Prow Secrets Management

Secrets in prow service/build clusters are managed with Kubernetes External Secrets, which is responsible for one-way syncing secret values from major secret manager providers such as GCP, Azure, and AWS secret managers into kubernetes clusters, based on ExternalSecret custom resource defined in cluster (As shown in example below).

Note: the instructions below are only for GCP secret manager, for authenticating with other providers please refer to https://github.com/external-secrets/kubernetes-external-secrets#backends

Set Up (Prow maintainers)

This is performed by prow service/build clusters maintainer.

In the cluster that the secrets are synced to, enable workload identity by following workload-identity.
Deploy kubernetes-external-secrets_crd.yaml, kubernetes-external-secrets_deployment.yaml, kubernetes-external-secrets_rbac.yaml, and kubernetes-external-secrets_service.yaml under config/prow/cluster. The deployment file assumes using the same service account name as used in step #1
[Optional but recommended] Create postsubmit deploy job for managing the deployment, for example post-test-infra-deploy-prow.

Usage (Prow clients)

This is performed by prow serving/build cluster clients. Note that the GCP project mentioned here doesn’t have to, and normally is not the same GCP project where the prow service/build clusters are located.

In the GCP project that stores secrets with google secret manager, grant the roles/secretmanager.viewer and roles/secretmanager.secretAccessor permission to the GCP service account used above, by running:
```
gcloud beta secrets add-iam-policy-binding <my-gsm-secret-name> --member="serviceAccount:<same-service-account-for-workload-identity>" --role=<role> --project=<my-gsm-secret-project>
```
The above command ensures that the service account used by prow can only access the secret name <my-gsm-secret-name> in the GCP project owned by clients. The service account used for prow.k8s.io (aka test-infra-trusted build cluster) is defined in trusted_serviceaccounts.yaml, and the secrets are defined in kubernetes_external_secrets.yaml. The service account used for k8s-prow-builds cluster(aka the default build cluster) is defined in build_serviceaccounts.yaml, and the secrets are defined in build_kubernetes-external-secrets_customresource.yaml.
Create secret in google secret manager

Create kubernetes external secrets custom resource by:

apiVersion: kubernetes-client.io/v1
kind: ExternalSecret
metadata:
  name: <my-precious-secret-kes-name>    # name of the k8s external secret and the k8s secret
  namespace:  <ns-where-secret-is-used>
spec:
  backendType: gcpSecretsManager
  projectId: <my-gsm-secret-project>
  data:
  - key: <my-gsm-secret-name>     # name of the GCP secret
    name: <my-kubernetes-secret-name>   # key name in the k8s secret
    version: latest    # version of the GCP secret
    # Property to extract if secret in backend is a JSON object,
    # remove this line if using the GCP secret value straight
    property: value

Within 10 seconds (determined by POLLER_INTERVAL_MILLISECONDS envvar on deployment), a secret will be created automatically:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: <my-precious-secret-kes-name>
  namespace:  <ns-where-secret-is-used>
data:
  <my-kubernetes-secret-name>: <value_read_from_gsm>

The Secret will be updated automatically when the secret value in gsm changed or the ExternalSecret is changed. when ExternalSecret CR is deleted from the cluster, the secret will be also be deleted by kubernetes external secret. (Note: deleting the ExternelSecret CR config from source control doesn’t result in deletion of corresponding ExternalSecret CR from the cluster as the postsubmit action only does kubectl apply).

17 - Gerrit

Gerrit is a free, web-based team code collaboration tool.

Prow-gerrit adapter (doc, code)
Crier (the reporter) (doc, code)

Client

We have a gerrit-client package that provides a thin wrapper around andygrunwald/go-gerrit, which is a go client library for accessing the Gerrit Code Review REST API

You can create a client instance by pass in a map of instance-name:project-ids, and pass in an oauth token path to start the client, like:

projects := map[string][]string{
 "foo.googlesource.com": {
  "project-bar",
  "project-baz",
 },
}

c, err := gerrit.NewClient(projects)
if err != nil {
 // handle error
}
c.Start(cookiefilePath)

The client will try to refetch token from the path every 10 minutes.

You should also utilize grandmatriarch to generate a token from a passed-in service account credential.

If you need extra features, feel free to introduce new gerrit API functions to the client package.

Adapter

The adapter package implements a controller that is periodically polling gerrit, and triggering presubmit and postsubmit jobs based on your prow config.

Gerrit Labels

Prow adds the following Labels to Gerrit Presubmits that can be accessed in the container by leveraging the Downward API.

“prow.k8s.io/gerrit-revision”: SHA of current patchset from a gerrit change
“prow.k8s.io/gerrit-patchset”: Numeric ID of the current patchset
“prow.k8s.io/gerrit-report-label”: Gerrit label prow will cast vote on, fallback to CodeReview label if unset

    - name: PATHCSET_NUMBER
      valueFrom:
        fieldRef:
          fieldPath: metadata.labels['prow.k8s.io/gerrit-patchset']

Caveat

The gerrit adapter currently does not support gerrit hooks, If you need them, please send us a PR to support them :-)

18 - ProwJobs

For a brief overview of how Prow runs jobs take a look at “Life of a Prow Job”.

For a brief cookbook for jobs intended for prow.k8s.io, please refer to config/jobs/README.md

Make sure Prow has been deployed correctly:

The horologium component schedules periodic jobs.
The hook component schedules presubmit and postsubmit jobs, ensuring the repo:
- enabled trigger in plugins.yaml
- sends GitHub webhooks to prow.
The plank component schedules the pod requested by a prowjob.
The crier component reports status back to github.

How to configure new jobs

To configure a new job you’ll need to add an entry into config.yaml. If you have update-config plugin deployed then the config will be automatically updated once the PR is merged, else you will need to run make update-config. This does not require redeploying any binaries, and will take effect within a few minutes.

Alternatively, the inrepoconfig feature can be used to version Presubmit jobs in the same repository that also contains the code and have Prow load them dynamically. See its documentation for more details.

Prow requires you to have a basic understanding of kubernetes, such that you can define pods in yaml. Please see kubernetes documentation for help here, for example the Pod overview and PodSpec api reference.

Periodic config looks like so (see GoDocs for complete config):

periodics:
- name: foo-job         # Names need not be unique, but must match the regex ^[A-Za-z0-9-._]+$
  decorate: true        # Enable Pod Utility decoration. (see below)
  interval: 1h          # Anything that can be parsed by time.ParseDuration.
  # Alternatively use a cron instead of an interval, for example:
  # cron: "05 15 * * 1-5"  # Run at 7:05 PST (15:05 UTC) every M-F
  extra_refs:            # Periodic job doesn't clone any repo by default, needs to be added explicitly
  - org: org
    repo: repo
    base_ref: main
  spec: {}              # Valid Kubernetes PodSpec.

Postsubmit config looks like so (see GoDocs for complete config):

postsubmits:
  org/repo:
  - name: bar-job         # As for periodics.
    decorate: true        # As for periodics.
    spec: {}              # As for periodics.
    max_concurrency: 10   # Run no more than this number concurrently.
    branches:             # Regexps, only run against these branches.
    - ^main$
    skip_branches:        # Regexps, do not run against these branches.
    - ^release-.*$

Postsubmits are run by the trigger plugin when a push event happens on a repo, hence they are configured per-repo. If no branches are specified, then they will run on every push to every branch on the given repo.

Postsubmit jobs apply run_if_changed and skip_if_only_changed filters based on which files were modified by the commits included in the specific push event from github.

Presubmit config looks like so (see GoDocs for complete config):

presubmits:
  org/repo:
  - name: qux-job            # As for periodics.
    decorate: true           # As for periodics.
    always_run: true         # Run for every PR, or only when requested.
    run_if_changed: "qux/.*" # Regexp, only run on certain changed files.
    skip_report: true        # Whether to skip setting a status on GitHub.
    context: qux-job         # Status context. Defaults to the job name.
    max_concurrency: 10      # As for postsubmits.
    spec: {}                 # As for periodics.
    branches: []             # As for postsubmits.
    skip_branches: []        # As for postsubmits.
    trigger: "(?m)qux test this( please)?" # Regexp, see discussion.
    rerun_command: "qux test this please"  # String, see discussion.

Presubmit jobs are run for pull requests by the trigger plugin.

The trigger is a regexp that matches the rerun_command. Users will be told to input the rerun_command when they want to rerun the job. Actually, anything that matches trigger will suffice. This is useful if you want to make one command that reruns all jobs. If unspecified, the default configuration makes /test <job-name> trigger the job.

See the Triggering Jobs section below to learn how to control when jobs are automatically run. We also have sections about posting and requiring GitHub status contexts. A useful pattern when adding new jobs is to start with always_run set to false and skip_report set to true. Test it out a few times by manually triggering, then switch always_run to true. Watch for a couple days, then switch skip_report to false.

Presubmit jobs apply run_if_changed and skip_if_only_changed filters based on which files were modified in any of the commits in the pull request.

Presets

Presets can be used to define commonly reused values for a subset of fields for PodSpecs and BuildSpecs. A preset config looks like:

presets:
- labels:                  # a job with these labels/values will have the preset applied
    preset-foo-bar: "true" #   key:value pair must be unique among presets
  env:                     # list of valid Kubernetes EnvVars
  - name: FOO
    value: BAR
  volumes:                 # list of valid Kubernetes Volumes
  - name: foo
    emptyDir: {}
  - name: bar
    secret:
      secretName: bar
  volumeMounts:            # list of valid Kubernetes VolumeMounts
  - name: foo
    mountPath: /etc/foo
  - name: bar
    mountPath: /etc/bar
    readOnly: true

And to use the preset, add corresponding label in prow job definition like:

- name: obfsucated-job-with-mysteriously-hidden-side-effects
  labels:
    preset-foo-bar: "true"

Alternatively, annonymous presets can be applied to all jobs, the config looks like:

- env:                     # a preset with no labels is applied to all jobs
  - name: BAZ
    value: qux
  volumes:
    # etc...
  volumeMounts:
    # etc...

Standard Triggering and Execution Behavior for Jobs

When configuring jobs, it is necessary to keep in mind the set of rules Prow has for triggering jobs, the GitHub status contexts that those jobs provide, and the rules for protecting those contexts on branches.

Triggering Jobs

Trigger Types

prow will consider three different types of jobs that run on pull requests (presubmits):

jobs that run unconditionally and automatically. All jobs that set always_run: true fall into this set.
jobs that run conditionally, but automatically. All jobs that set run_if_changed or skip_if_only_changed to some value fall into this set.
jobs that run conditionally, but not automatically. All jobs that set always_run: false and do not set run_if_changed/skip_if_only_changed to any value fall into this set and require a human to trigger them with a command.

By default, jobs fall into the third category and must have their always_run, run_if_changed, or skip_if_only_changed configured to operate differently.

In the rest of this document, “a job running unconditionally” indicates that the job will run even if it is normally conditional and the conditions are not met. Similarly, “a job running conditionally” indicates that the job runs if all of its conditions are met.

Triggering Jobs Based On Changes

Jobs that set always_run: false may be configured to run conditionally based on the contents of the pull request. run_if_changed and skip_if_only_changed accept a (Golang-style) regular expression which is run against the path of each changed file.

run_if_changed triggers the job if any path matches. For example, you may wish to trigger a compilation job if the pull request changes any *.c or *.h file, or the Makefile:

presubmits:
  org/repo:
  - name: compile-job
    always_run: false
    run_if_changed: "(\\.[ch]|^Makefile)$"
    ...

skip_if_only_changed skips the job if all paths match. For example, you may wish to skip a compilation job for pull requests that only change documentation files:

presubmits:
  org/repo:
  - name: compile-job
    always_run: false
    skip_if_only_changed: "^docs/|\\.(md|adoc)$|^(README|LICENSE)$"

Both of the above examples would trigger on a pull request containing foo/bar.c and SECURITY.md, but not one containing only SECURITY.md.

Note:

run_if_changed and skip_if_only_changed are mutually exclusive.
Jobs which would otherwise be skipped based on this configuration can still be triggered explicitly with comments (see below).
Only presubmit and postsubmit jobs are inherently associated with git refs and can use these fields.

Triggering Jobs With Comments

A developer may trigger presubmits by posting a comment to a pull request that contains one or more of the following phrases:

/test job-name : When posting /test job-name, any jobs with matching triggers will be triggered unconditionally.
/retest : When posting /retest, two types of jobs will be triggered:
- all jobs that have run and failed will run unconditionally
- any not-yet-executed automatically run jobs will run conditionally
/test all : When posting /test all, all automatically run jobs will run conditionally.

Note: It is possible to configure a job’s trigger to match any of the above keywords (/retest and/or /test all) but this behavior is not suggested as it will confuse developers that expect consistent behavior from these commands. More generally, it is possible to configure a job’s trigger to match any command that is otherwise known to Prow in some other context, like /close. It is similarly not suggested to do this.

Posting GitHub Status Contexts

Presubmit and postsubmit jobs post a status context to the GitHub commit under test once they start, unless the job is configured with skip_report: true.

Use a /retest or /test job-name to re-trigger the test and hopefully update the failed context to passing.

If a job should no longer trigger on the pull request, use the /skip command to dismiss a failing status context (depends on skip plugin).

Repo administrators can also /override job-name in case of emergency (depends on the override plugin).

Requiring Job Statuses

Requiring Jobs for Auto-Merge Through Tide

Tide will treat jobs in the following manner for merging:

unconditionally run jobs with required status contexts are always required to have passed on a pull request to merge
conditionally run jobs with required status contexts are required to have passed on a pull request to merge if the job currently matches the pull request.
jobs with optional status contexts are ignored when merging

In order to set a job’s context to be optional, set optional: true on the job. If it is required to not post the results of the job to GitHub whatsoever, the job may be set to be optional and silent by setting skip_report: true. It is valid to set both of these options at the same time.

Protecting Status Contexts

The branch protection rules will only enforce the presence of jobs that run unconditionally and have required status contexts. As conditionally-run jobs may or may not post a status context to GitHub, they cannot be required through this mechanism.

Running a ProwJob in a Build Cluster

ProwJobs that execute as Kubernetes resources (namely agent: kubernetes jobs that run as Pods, the default value) can specify a cluster: build-cluster-name field as part of the ProwJob config to specify that the job should be run in a build cluster other than the default build cluster.

periodics:
- name: periodic-cluster-a
  cluster: cluster-a
  ...
presubmits:
  org/repo:
  - name: presubmit-cluster-b
    cluster: cluster-b
    ...
postsubmits:
  org/repo:
  - name: postsubmit-default-cluster
    # cluster field omitted or set to "default"
    ...

You can learn more about creating and using build clusters in “Using Prow at Scale” and “Deploying Prow”.

Pod Utilities

If you are adding a new job that will execute on a Kubernetes cluster (agent: kubernetes, the default value) you should consider using the Pod Utilities. The pod utils decorate jobs with additional containers that transparently provide source code checkout and log/metadata/artifact uploading to GCS.

Job Environment Variables

Prow will expose the following environment variables to your job. If the job runs on Kubernetes, the variables will be injected into every container in your pod, If the job is run in Jenkins, Prow will supply them as parameters to the build.

Variable	Periodic	Postsubmit	Batch	Presubmit	Description	Example
`CI`	✓	✓	✓	✓	Represents whether the current environment is a CI environment	`true`
`ARTIFACTS`	✓	✓	✓	✓	Directory in which to place files to be uploaded when the job completes	`/logs/artifacts`
`JOB_NAME`	✓	✓	✓	✓	Name of the job.	`pull-test-infra-bazel`
`JOB_TYPE`	✓	✓	✓	✓	Type of job.	`presubmit`
`JOB_SPEC`	✓	✓	✓	✓	JSON-encoded job specification.	see below
`BUILD_ID`	✓	✓	✓	✓	Unique build number for each run.	`12345`
`PROW_JOB_ID`	✓	✓	✓	✓	Unique identifier for the owning Prow Job.	`1ce07fa2-0831-11e8-b07e-0a58ac101036`
`REPO_OWNER`		✓	✓	✓	GitHub org that triggered the job.	`kubernetes`
`REPO_NAME`		✓	✓	✓	GitHub repo that triggered the job.	`test-infra`
`PULL_BASE_REF`		✓	✓	✓	Ref name of the base branch.	`master`
`PULL_BASE_SHA`		✓	✓	✓	Git SHA of the base branch.	`123abc`
`PULL_REFS`		✓	✓	✓	All refs to test.	`master:123abc,5:qwe456`
`PULL_NUMBER`				✓	Pull request number.	`5`
`PULL_PULL_SHA`				✓	Pull request head SHA.	`qwe456`
`PULL_HEAD_REF`				✓	Pull request branch name.	`fixup-some-stuff`
`PULL_TITLE`				✓	Pull request title.	`Add something`

Examples of the JSON-encoded job specification follow for the different job types:

Periodic Job:

{"type":"periodic","job":"job-name","buildid":"0","prowjobid":"uuid","refs":{}}

Postsubmit Job:

{"type":"postsubmit","job":"job-name","buildid":"0","prowjobid":"uuid","refs":{"org":"org-name","repo":"repo-name","base_ref":"base-ref","base_sha":"base-sha"}}

Presubmit Job:

{"type":"presubmit","job":"job-name","buildid":"0","prowjobid":"uuid","refs":{"org":"org-name","repo":"repo-name","base_ref":"base-ref","base_sha":"base-sha","pulls":[{"number":1,"author":"author-name","sha":"pull-sha","title":"pull-title","head_ref":"pull-branch"}]}}

Batch Job:

{"type":"batch","job":"job-name","buildid":"0","prowjobid":"uuid","refs":{"org":"org-name","repo":"repo-name","base_ref":"base-ref","base_sha":"base-sha","pulls":[{"number":1,"author":"author-name","sha":"pull-sha"},{"number":2,"author":"other-author-name","sha":"second-pull-sha"}]}}

Testing a new job

See “How to test a ProwJob”.

Badges

Prow can display badges that signal whether jobs are passing (example).

The format to send your deck URL is /badge.svg?jobs=single-job-name or /badge.svg?jobs=common-job-prefix-*.

19 - Setting up Private Deck

1) [User] Create a PR to Set up TenantIDs for prowjobs and Repos

Prow users should create a PR creating tenantID defaults for their org/repos and clusters. Once you set up a tenantID, all prowjobs labelled with that tenantID will only be visible on Deck instances created with the same tenantID. If you already have prowjobs that you don’t want to lose access to on Deck, do this step last. If not, do it first to make sure prowjobs you want to keep sequestered do not appear on other instances of Deck.

The recommended way to add tenantIDs to prowjobs based on org/repo or cluster is through prowjob_default_entries in the prow config. This will apply the tenant ID to jobs with matching cluster AND repo. If you want to do cluster OR repo, create two entries in the config and use “*” for either field.

prowjob_default_entries:
  - cluster: "build-private"
    repo: "*"
    config:
      tenant_id: 'private'
  - cluster: '*'
    repo: 'private'
    config:
      tenant_id: 'private'

This configuration is used both to apply tenantIDs to prowjobs, but is also used by Deck to filter out Tide information from orgRepos with tenantIDs that do not match. So even if you can lable all your prowjobs using cluster, make sure that all of your repos are given a tenantID as well.

Once the PR is created, Prow operators should review the PR to make sure that no other tenantIDs were affected by the change.

Override TenantIDs

You can also define a tenantID for a given prowjob by defining it in the prowjob spec under spec.ProwJobDefault. This will override the tenantID assigned via prowjob defaults.

2) [Operator] Create a New Service Account and Bind it

kind: ServiceAccount
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  namespace: default
  name: <SA_NAME>
  annotations:
    "iam.gke.io/gcp-service-account": "..."

gcloud iam service-accounts add-iam-policy-binding \
  --project=PROJECT \
  --role=roles/iam.workloadIdentityUser \
  --member=serviceAccount:K8S_PROJECT.svc.id.goog[SOMEWHERE/SOMETHING] \
  SOMEBODY@PROJECT.iam.gserviceaccount.com

Once the service account is created, grant the service account Viewer access to the GCS bucket where test results are located.

3) [Operator] (Optional) Create a New OauthApp for Authentication

If you want to make the new Deck instance private, create a new oauth app using the Prowbot github account.

You can follow this Documentation to create the app:

Creating oauth Secrets

You will need to create two secrets populated with information from the oauth app

github-oauth-config:

data: 
  secret: {
    "client_id":"...",
    "client_secret":"...",
    "redirect_url":"...",
    "cookie_secret":"...",
    "final_redirect_url":"...",
    "scopes":[]
    }

oauth-config

data: 
  clientID: ...
  clientSecret: ...
  cookieSecret: ...

For more information on how to make these secrets take a look at the Secrets Documentation

4 [User] Create the new Deck Deployment

When creating the new Deck Deployment, make sure to update the following fields:

Update Service Account on new Deployment
Update TenantID on new Deployment
- Add - --tenant-id=NEW_ID under args in the Deck deployment spec
- You can add this flag multiple times to allow multiple tenantIDs

(Optional) Add a volume mount for the oauth app and update the oauth-config

Here is an example of oauth2-proxy being used with github account validation. The oauth and oauth-config secrets are made in step 3.

volumeMounts:
...
- name: oauth2-proxy
    image: quay.io/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy
    ports:
    - containerPort: 4180
      protocol: TCP
    args:
    - --provider=github
    - --github-org=ORG
    - --github-team=TEAM
    - --http-address=0.0.0.0:4180
    - --upstream=http://localhost:8080
    - --cookie-domain=DOMAIN
    - --cookie-name=COOKIE NAME (can be anything)
    - --cookie-samesite=none
    - --cookie-expire=23h
    - --email-domain=*
    livenessProbe:
      httpGet:
        path: /ping
        port: 4180
      initialDelaySeconds: 3
      periodSeconds: 3
    readinessProbe:
      httpGet:
        path: /ping
        port: 4180
      initialDelaySeconds: 3
      periodSeconds: 3
    env:
    - name: OAUTH2_PROXY_CLIENT_ID
      valueFrom:
        secretKeyRef:
          name: oauth
          key: clientID
    - name: OAUTH2_PROXY_CLIENT_SECRET
      valueFrom:
        secretKeyRef:
          name: oauth
          key: clientSecret
    - name: OAUTH2_PROXY_COOKIE_SECRET
      valueFrom:
        secretKeyRef:
          name: oauth
          key: cookieSecret
    - name: OAUTH2_PROXY_REDIRECT_URL
      value: https://prow.infra.cft.dev/oauth2/callback

volumes:
...
- name: oauth-config
    secret:
      secretName: oauth-config

Here is an example private deployment.

5 [Operator] Use the New Deployment

In order to use the new Deployment you will need to:

Make a new static IP

On GCP go to VPC Networks -> ExternalIP
Click Reserve Static Address
Set the Region to Global

Create new Domain and configure DNS with new Static IP
Make a new Ingress with the new Domain

Create a new Managed Cert
Add the new Rule
Configure Ingress to use the managed cert
Here is an example

6 [User] Update status check links

In the prow config, add the new domain to target_urls and job_url_prefix_config like so:

target_urls:
   "*": https://oss-prow.knative.dev/tide
   "privateOrg/repo": https://DOMAIN/tide

job_url_prefix_config:
   "*": https://oss-prow.knative.dev/view/
   "privateOrg/repo": https://DOMAIN/view/

7 [Operator] Ensure that the public deck service account does not have access to the bucket for the jobs you wish to remain private

20 - Spyglass

Spyglass

Spyglass is a pluggable artifact viewer framework for Prow. It collects artifacts (usually files in a storage bucket) from various sources and distributes them to registered viewers, which are responsible for consuming them and rendering a view.

A typical Spyglass page might look something like this:

If you want to know how to write a Spyglass lens, check the lens-writing guide. If you’re interested in how Spyglass works, check the architecture summary.

Configuration

Using Spyglass on your Prow instance requires you to first enable Spyglass in deck, and then configure Spyglass to actually do something.

Enabling Spyglass

To enable spyglass, just pass the --spyglass flag to your deck instance. Once spyglass is enabled, it will expose itself under /view/ on your deck instance.

In order to make Spyglass useful, you may want to set your job URLs to point at it. You can do so by setting plank.job_url_prefix_config['*'] to https://your.deck/view/, and possibly plank.job_url_template to reference something similar depending on your setup.

If you are not using the images we provide, you may also need to provide --spyglass-files-location, pointing at the on-disk location of the lenses folder in this directory.

Configuring Spyglass

Spyglass configuration is contained in the spyglass subsection of the deck section of Prow’s primary configuration.

The spyglass block has the following properties:

Name	Required	Example	Description
`size_limit`	Yes	`100000000`	The maximum size of an artifact to download, in bytes. Larger values will be omitted or truncated.
`gcs_browser_prefix`	No	`https://gcsweb.k8s.io/gcs/` `https://s3.console.aws.amazon.com/s3/buckets/`	If you have a GCS browser available, the bucket and path to the artifact directory will be appended to `gcs_browser_prefix` and linked from Spyglass pages. If left unset, no artifacts link will be visible. The provided URL should have a trailing slash
`testgrid_config`	No	`gs://k8s-testgrid/config`	If you have a TestGrid instance available, `testgrid_config` should point to the TestGrid config proto on GCS. If omitted, no TestGrid link will be visible.
`testgrid_root`	No	`https://testgrid.k8s.io/`	If you have a TestGrid instance available, `testgrid_root` should point to the root of the TestGrid web interface. If omitted, no TestGrid link will be visible.
`announcement`	No	`"Remember: friendship is magic!"`	If announcement is set, the string will appear at the top of the page. `announcement` is parsed as a Go template. The only value provided is `.ArtifactPath`, which is of the form `gcs-bucket/path/to/job/root/`.
`lenses`	Yes	(see below)	`lenses` configures the lenses you want, when they should be visible, what artifacts they should receive, and any lens specific configuration

Configuring Lenses

Lenses are the Spyglass components that actually display information. The lenses block under the spyglass block is a list of configuration for each lens. Each lens entry has the following properties:

Name	Required	Example	Description
`required_files`	Yes	`- build-log\.txt`	A list of regexes matching artifact names that must be present for a lens to appear. The list entries are ANDed together - that is, something much match every entry. OR can be simulated by using a pipe in a single regex entry.
`optional_files`	No	`- something\.txt`	A list of regexes matching artifact names that will be provided to a lens if present, but are not necessary for it to appear (for that, use `required_files`). Since each entry in the list is optional, these are effectively ORed together.
`lens.name`	Yes	`buildlog`	The name of the lens you want to render these files. Must be a known lens name.
`lens.config`	No		Lens-specific configuration. What can be included here, if anything, depends on the lens in question.

The following lenses are available:

metadata: parses the metadata files generated by podutils and displays their content. It has no configuration.
junit: parses junit files and displays their content. It has no configuration
buildlog: displays the build log (or any other log file), highlighting interesting parts and hiding the rest behind expandable folders. You can configure what it considers “interesting” by providing highlight_regexes, a list of regexes to highlight. If not specified, it uses defaults optimised for highlighting Kubernetes test results. The optional hide_raw_log boolean field can be used to omit the link to the raw build-log.txt source.
podinfo: displays info about ProwJob pods including the events and details about containers and volumes. The gcsk8sreporter Crier reporter must be enabled to upload the required podinfo.json file.
coverage: displays go coverage content
restcoverage: displays REST API statistics

Example Configuration

deck:
  spyglass:
    size_limit: 100000000  # 100 MB
    gcs_browser_prefix: https://gcsweb.k8s.io/gcs/
    testgrid_config: gs://k8s-testgrid/config
    testgrid_root: https://testgrid.k8s.io/
    announcement: "The old job viewer has been deprecated."
    lenses:
    - lens:
        name: metadata
      required_files:
      - ^(?:started|finished)\.json$
      optional_files:
      - ^(?:podinfo|prowjob)\.json$
    - lens:
        name: buildlog
        config:
          highlight_regexes:
          - timed out
          - 'ERROR:'
          - (FAIL|Failure \[)\b
          - panic\b
          - ^E\d{4} \d\d:\d\d:\d\d\.\d\d\d]
      required_files:
      - ^build-log\.txt$
    - lens:
        name: junit
      required_files:
      - ^artifacts/junit.*\.xml$
    - lens:
        name: podinfo
        config:
          runner_configs: # Would only work if `prowjob.json` is configured below
            "<BUILD_CLUSTER_ALIAS>":
              pod_link_template: "https://<YOUR_CLOUD_PROVIDER_URL>/{{ .Name }}" # Name is directly from the Pod truct.
            # Example:
            # "default":
            #    pod_link_template: "https://console.cloud.google.com/kubernetes/pod/us-central1-f/prow/test-pods/{{ .Name }}/details?project=k8s-prow-builds"
      required_files:
        - ^podinfo\.json$
      optional_files:
        - ^prowjob\.json$ # Only if runner_configs is configured.

Accessing custom storage buckets

By default, spyglass has access to all storage buckets defined globally (plank.default_decoration_config_entries[...].gcs_configuration) or on individual jobs (<path-to-job>.gcs_configuration.bucket). In order to access additional/custom storage buckets, those buckets must be listed in deck.additional_storage_buckets.

20.1 - Spyglass Architecture

Spyglass is split into two major parts: the Spyglass core, and a set of independent lenses. Lenses are designed to run statelessly and without any knowledge of the world outside being provided with a list of artifacts. The core is responsible for selecting lenses and providing them with artifacts.

Spyglass Core

The Spyglass Core is split across pkg/spyglass and cmd/deck. It has the following responsibilities:

Looking up artifacts for a given job and mapping those to lenses
Generating a page that loads the required lenses
Framing lenses with their boilerplate
Faciliating communication between the lens frontends and backends

Spyglass Lenses

Spyglass Lenses currently all live in pkg/spyglass/lenses, though hopefully in the future they can live elsewhere. Spyglass lenses have the following responsibilities:

Fetching artifacts
Rendering HTML for human consumption

Lens frontends are run in sandboxed iframes (currently sandbox="allow-scripts allow-top-navigation allow-popups allow-same-origin"), which ensures that they can only interact with the world via the intended API. In particular, this prevents lenses from interacting with other Deck pseudo-APIs or with the core spyglass page.

In order to provide this API to lenses, a library (cmd/deck/static/spyglass/lens.ts) is injected into the lenses under the spyglass namespace. This library communicates with the spyglass core via window.postMessage. The spyglass core then takes the requested action on the lens’s behalf, which includes facilitating communication between the lens frontend and backend. The messages exchanged between the core and the lens are described in cmd/deck/static/spyglass/common.ts. The messages are exchanged over a simple JSON-encoded protocol where each message sent from the lens has an ID number attached, and a response with the same ID number is expected to be received.

For the purposes of static typing, the lens library is ambiently declared in pkg/spyglass/lenses/lens.d.ts, which just re-exports the definition of spyglass from lens.ts.

This design is discussed in its implementation PR.

Lens endpoints

Lenses are exposed by the spyglass core on the following Deck endpoints:

URL	Method	Purpose
`/spyglass/lens/:lens_name/iframe`	GET	The iframe view loaded directly by the spyglass core
`/spyglass/lens/:lens_name/rerender`	POST	Returns the lens `body`, used by calls to `spyglass.updatePage` and `spyglass.requestPage`
`/spyglass/lens/:lens_name/callback`	POST	Allows the lens frontend to exchange arbitrary strings with the lens backend. Used by `spyglass.request()`

In all cases, the endpoint expects a JSON blob via the query parameter req that contains bookkeeping information required by the spyglass core - the artifacts required, what job this is about, a reference to the lens configuration. This information is attached to requests by the spyglass core, and the lenses are not directly aware of it. In the case of the POSTed endpoints /rerender and /callback, the lens can choose to attach an arbitrary string for its own use. This string is passed through the core as an opaque string.

Some additional query parameters are attached to the iframes created by the spyglass core. These are not used by the backend, and are provided as a convenient means to synchronously provide information from the frontend core to the frontend lens library.

Page loading sequence

When a spyglass page is loaded, the following occurs:

The core backend generates a list of artifacts for the job (e.g. by listing from GCS)
The core backend matches the artifact list against the configured lenses and determines which ones to display.
The core backend generates an HTML page with the lens->resource mapping embedded in it as JavaScript objects.
The core frontend reads the embedded mapping and generates iframes for each lens
The core receives the simultaneous requests to the lens endpoints and invokes the lenses to generate their content, injecting the lens library alongside some basic styling.

After this final step completes, the page is fully rendered. Lenses may choose to request additional information from their frontend, in which case the following happens:

The lens frontend makes a request to the core frontend
The core frontend attaches some lens-specific metadata and makes an HTTP request to the relevant lens endpoint
The core backend receives the request and invokes the lens backend with the relevant information attached.

20.2 - Build a Spyglass Lens

Spyglass lenses consist of two components: a frontend (which may be trivial) and a backend.

Lens backend

Today, a lens backend must be linked in to the deck binary. As such, lenses must live under pkg/spyglass/lenses. Additionally lenses must be in a folder that matches the name of the lens. The content of this folder will be served by deck, enabling you to reference static content such as images, stylesheets, or scripts.

Inside your template you must implement the lenses.Lens interface.

An instance of the struct implementing the lenses.Lens interface must then be registered with spyglass, by calling lenses.RegisterLens.

A minimal example of a lens called samplelens, located at lenses/samplelens, might look like this:

package samplelens
import (
	"encoding/json"

	"sigs.k8s.io/prow/pkg/config"
	"sigs.k8s.io/prow/pkg/spyglass/lenses"
)

type Lens struct{}

func init() {
	lenses.RegisterLens(Lens{})
}

// Config returns the lens's configuration.
func (lens Lens) Config() lenses.LensConfig {
	return lenses.LensConfig{
		Title:     "Human Readable Lens",
		Name:      "samplelens", // remember: this *must* match the location of the lens (and thus package name)
		Priority:  0,
	}
}

// Header returns the content of <head>
func (lens Lens) Header(artifacts []lenses.Artifact, resourceDir string, config json.RawMessage, spyglassConfig config.Spyglass) string {
	return ""
}

func (lens Lens) Callback(artifacts []lenses.Artifact, resourceDir string, data string, config json.RawMessage, spyglassConfig config.Spyglass) string {
	return ""
}

// Body returns the displayed HTML for the <body>
func (lens Lens) Body(artifacts []lenses.Artifact, resourceDir string, data string, config json.RawMessage, spyglassConfig config.Spyglass) string {
	return "Hi! I'm a lens!"
}

If you want to read resources included in your lens (such as templates), you can find them in the provided resourceDir.

Finally, you will need to import your lens from deck in order to actually link it in. You can do this by importing it from cmd/deck/main.go, alongside the other lenses:

import (
	// ...
	_ "sigs.k8s.io/prow/pkg/spyglass/lenses/samplelens"
)

Finally, you can then test it by running ./cmd/deck/runlocal and loading a spyglass page.

Lens frontend

The HTML generated by a lens can reference static assets that will be served by Deck on behalf of your lens. Scripts and stylesheets can be referenced in the output of the Header() function (which is inserted into the <head> element). Relative references into your directory will work: spyglass adds a <base> tag that references the expected output directory.

Spyglass lenses have access to a spyglass global that provides a number of APIs to interact with your lens backend and the rest of the world. Your lens is rendered in a sandboxed iframe, so you generally cannot interact without using these APIs.

We recommend writing lenses using TypeScript, and provide TypeScript declarations for the spyglass APIs.

In order to build frontend resources in, you will need to notify the build system. Assuming you had a template called template.html, a typescript file called sample.ts, a stylesheet called style.css, and an image called magic.png. The changes are:

Add a new file called tsconfig.json:

{
  "extends": "../../../../tsconfig.json",
  "include": [
    "sample.ts",
  ],
}

Add a line in cmd/deck/.ts-packages:

prow/spyglass/lenses/sample/sample.ts->script_bundle.min.js

With this setup, you would reference your script in your HTML as script_bundle.min.js, like so:

<script type="text/javascript" src="script_bundle.min.js"></script>

Lens APIs

Many Spyglass APIs are asynchronous, and so return a Promise. We recommend using async/await to use them, like this:

async function doStuff(): Promise<void> {
  const someStuff = await spyglass.request("");
}

We provide the following methods under spyglass in all lenses:

`spyglass.contentUpdated(): void`

contentUpdated should be called whenever you make changes to the content of the page. It signals to the Spyglass host page that it needs to recalculate how your lens is displayed. It is not necessary to call it on initial page load.

`spyglass.request(data: string): Promise<string>`

request is used to call back to your lens’s backend. Whatever data you provide will be provided unmodified to your lens backend’s Callback() method. request returns a Promise, which will eventually be resolved with the string returned from Callback() (unless an error occurs, in which case it will fail). We recommend, but do not require, that both strings be JSON-encoded.

`spyglass.updatePage(data: string): Promise<void>`

updatePage calls your lens backend’s Body() method again, passing in whatever data you provide and shows a loading spinner. Once the call completes, the lens is re-displayed using the newly-provided <body>. Note that this does not reload the lens, and so your script will keep running. The returned promise resolves once the new content is ready.

`spyglass.requestPage(data: string): Promise<string>`

requestPage calls your lens backend’s Body() method again, passing in whatever data you provide. Unlike updatePage, it does not show a spinner, and does not change the page. Instead, the returned promise will resolve with the newly-generated HTML.

`spyglass.makeFragmentLink(fragment: string): string`

makeFragmentLink returns a link to the top-level page that will cause your lens to receive the specified fragment in location.hash, and no other lens on the page to receive any fragment. This is useful when generating links for the user to copy to your content, but should not be used to perform direct navigation - instead, just update location.hash, and propagation will be handled transparently.

If the provided fragment does not have a leading # one will be added, for consistency with the behaviour of location.hash.

`spyglass.scrollTo(x: number, y: number): Promise<void>`

scrollTo scrolls the parent Spyglass page such that the provided (x, y) document-relative coordinate of your lens is visible. Note that we keep lenses at slightly under 100% page width, so only y is currently meaningful.

Special considerations

Sandboxing

Lenses are contained in sandboxed iframes in the parent page. The most notably restricted activity is making XHR requests to Deck, which would be considered prohibited CORS requests. Lenses also cannot directly interact with their parent window, outside of the provided APIs.

Links

We set a default <base> with href set pointing in to your resource directory, and target set to _top. This means that links will by default replace the entire spyglass page, which is usually the intended effect. It also means that src or href HTML attributes are based in those directories, which is usually what you want in this context.

Fragments / Anchor links

Fragment URLs (the part after the #) are supported fairly transparently, despite being in an iframe. The parent page muxes all the lens’s fragments and ensures that if the page is loaded, each lens receives the fragment it expects. Changing your fragment will automatically update the parent page’s fragment. If the fragment matches the ID or name of an element, the page will scroll such that that element is visible.

Anchor links (<a href="#something">) would usually not work well in conjunction with the <base> tag. To resolve this, we rewrite all links of this form to behave as expected both on page load and on DOM modification. In most cases, this should be transparent. If you want users to copy links via right click -> copy link, however, this will not work nicely. Instead, consider setting the href attribute to something from spyglass.makeFragmentLink, but handling clicks by manually setting location.hash to the desired fragment.

20.3 - REST API coverage lens

Presents REST endpoints statistics

Configuration

threshold_warning set threshold for warning highlight
threshold_error set threshold for error highlight

Expected input

uniqueHits total number of unique params calls (first hit of any leaf should increase this value)
expectedUniqueHits total number of params (leaves)
percent is uniqueHits * 100 / expectedUniqueHits
methodCalled whether the method was called
body body params
query query params
root root of the tree
hits number of all params hits
items collection of nodes, if not present then the node is a leaf
height height of the tree
size size of the tree

{
    "uniqueHits": 2,
    "expectedUniqueHits": 4,
    "percent": 50.00,
    "endpoints": {
        "/pets": {
            "post": {
                "uniqueHits": 2,
                "expectedUniqueHits": 4,
                "percent": 50.00,
                "methodCalled": true,
                "params": {
                    "body": {
                        "uniqueHits": 2,
                        "expectedUniqueHits": 4,
                        "percent": 50.00,
                        "root": {
                            "hits": 15,
                            "items": {
                                "origin": {
                                   "hits": 8,
                                   "items": {
                                       "country": {
                                           "hits": 8,
                                           "items": {
                                               "name": {
                                                   "hits": 8
                                               },
                                               "region": {
                                                   "hits": 0
                                               }
                                           }
                                       }
                                   }
                                },
                                "color": {
                                    "hits": 0
                                },
                                "type": {
                                    "hits": 7
                                }
                            }
                        },
                        "height": 4,
                        "size": 7
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

21 - Using Prow at Scale

If you are maintaining a Prow instance that will need to scale to handle a large load, consider using the following best practices, features, and additional tools. You may also be interested in “Getting more out of Prow”.

Features and Tools

Separate Build Cluster(s)

It is frequently not secure to run all ProwJobs in the same cluster that runs Prow’s service components (hook, plank, etc.). In particular, ProwJobs that execute presubmit tests for OSS projects should typically be isolated from Prow’s microservices. This isolation prevents a malicious PR author from modifying the presubmit test to do something evil like breaking out of the container and stealing secrets that live in the cluster or DOSing a cluster-internal Prow component service.

Any number of build clusters can be used in order to isolate specific jobs from each other, improve scalability, or allow tenants to provide and manage their own execution environments. Instructions for configuring jobs to run in different clusters can be found here.

Production Prow instances should run most ProwJobs in a build cluster separate from the Prow service cluster (the cluster where the Prow components live). Any ‘trusted’ jobs that require secrets or services that should not be exposed to presubmit jobs, such as publishing or deployment jobs, should run in a different cluster from the rest of the ‘untrusted’ jobs. It is common for the Prow service cluster to be reused as a build cluster for these ‘trusted’ jobs since they are typically fast and few in number so running and managing an additional build cluster would be wasteful.

Pull Request Merge Automation

Pull Requests can be automatically merged when they satisfy configured merge requirements using tide. Automating merge is critical for large projects where allowing human to click the merge button is either a bottle neck, a security concern, or both. Tide ensures that PRs have been tested against the most recent base branch commit before merging (retesting if necessary), and automatically groups multiple PRs to be tested and merged as a batch whenever possible.

Config File Split

If your Prow config starts to grow too large, consider splitting the job config files into more specific and easily reviewed files. This is particularly useful for delegating ownership of ProwJob config to different users or groups via the use of OWNERS files with the approve plugin and Tide. It is common to enforce custom config policies for jobs defined in certain files or directories via presubmit unit tests. This makes it safe for Prow admins to delegate job config ownership by enforcing limitations on what can be configured and by whom. For example, we use a golang unit test in a presubmit job to validate that all jobs that are configured to run in the test-infra-trusted build cluster are defined in a file controlled by test-infra oncall. (examples)

To use this pattern simply aggregate all job configs in a directory of files with unique base names and supply the directory path to components via --job-config-path. The updateconfig plugin and config-bootstrapper support this pattern by allowing multiple files to be loaded into a single configmap under different keys (different files once mounted to a container).

GitHub API Cache

ghproxy is a reverse proxy HTTP cache optimized for the GitHub API. It takes advantage of how GitHub responds to E-tags in order to fulfill repeated requests without spending additional API tokens. Check out this tool if you find that your GitHub bot is consuming or approaching its token limit. Similarly, re-deploying Prow components may trigger a large amount of API requests to GitHub which may trip the abuse detection mechanisms. At scale, the tide deployment itself may create enough API throughput to trigger this on its own. Deploying the GitHub proxy cache is critical to ensuring that Prow does not trip this mechanism when operating at scale.

Config Driven GitHub Org Management

Managing org and repo scoped settings across multiple orgs and repos is not easy with the mechanisms that GitHub provides. Only a few people have access to the settings, they must be manually synced between repos, and they can easily become inconsistent. These problems grow with number of orgs/repos and with the number of contributors. We have a few tools that automate this kind of administration and integrate well with Prow:

label_sync is a tool that synchronizes labels and their metadata across multiple orgs and repos in order to provide a consistent user experience in a multi-repo project.
branchprotector is a Prow component that synchronizes GitHub branch requirements and restrictions based on config.
peribolos is a tool that synchronizes org settings, teams, and memberships based on config.

Metrics

Prow exposes some Prometheus metrics that can be used to generate graphs and alerts. If you are maintaining a Prow instance that handles important workloads you should consider using these metrics for monitoring.

Best Practices

Some parts of Prow do not behave well if the GitHub bot token’s rate limit is exhausted. It is imperative to avoid this so it is a good practice to avoid using the bot token that Prow uses for any other purposes.

Working around GitHub’s limited ACLs.

GitHub provides an extremely limited access control system that makes it impossible to control granular permissions like authority to add and remove specific labels from PRs and issues. Instead, write access to the entire repo must be granted. This problem grows as projects scale and granular permissions become more important.

Much of the GitHub automation that Prow provides is designed to fill in the gaps in GitHub’s permission system. The core idea is to limit repo write access to the Prow bot (and a minimal number of repo admins) and then let Prow determine if users have the appropriate permissions before taking action on their behalf. The following is an overview of some of the automation Prow implements to work around GitHub’s limited permission system:

Permission to trigger presubmit tests is determined based on org membership as configured in the triggers plugin config section.
File ownership is described with OWNERS files and change approval is enforced with the approve plugin. See the docs for details.
Org member review of the most recent version of the PR is enforced with the lgtm plugin.
Various other plugins manage labels, milestone, and issue state based on /foo style commands from authorized users. Authorization may be based on org membership, GitHub team membership, or OWNERS file membership.
Tide provides PR merge automation so that humans do not need to (and are not allowed to) merge PRs. Without Tide, a user either has no permission to merge or they have repo write access which grants permission to merge any PR in the entire repo. Additionally, Tide enforces merge requirements like required and forbidden labels that humans may not respect if they are allowed to manually click the merge button.

22 - Understanding Started.json and Finished.json

Context

Prow uploads a host of artifacts throughout the life cycle of a job. Two of these artifacts that are present in each run are started.json and finished.json which contain a host of information pertaining to the job/run. These files have existed through the evolution of Kubernetes CI: from Jenkins -> Containerized Jenkins -> Bootstrap Containerized Jenkins -> Bootstrap Prow -> PodUtils. As of 2021, all jobs exist within either Bootstrap Prow or PodUtils. As the CI has evolved, so has started/finished.json and it’s function.

Examples: started.json finished.json

Related Issues:

#3412: What is the origin and purpose for the fields in these files?
#11100: This isn’t a source of truth and prow/pod/gcs are not in sync
#10699: Unify *.json structures, was partially covered as part of #10703

Format Source of Truth

There has not been a consistent source of truth for the format of these two files, which has caused issues. From discussion in the community it seems that the the TestGrid job definition.

Current Standards

There are currently different flavors of data format depending on if the job is Bootstrap or PodUtils. Ex of differences:

Bootstrapped PR (finished): "revision": "v1.20.0-alpha.0.261+06ea384605f172"
Decorated PR (finished): "revision":"5dd9241d43f256984358354d1fec468f274f9ac4"

Started.json Bootstrap

Fields	Content
node	This is the first element in the hostname using socket.gethostname split by ‘.’
pull	The SHA linked with the ‘main’ repo within ‘repos’
repo-version	“unknown” if no ‘repos’ otherwise read from local ‘version’ file (e2e tests use this path) otherwise execute version script if ‘hack/lib/version.sh exists
timestamp	epoch time
repos	comes from –repos= arg
version	exact same as `repo-version`
Ex

{
  "node": "0790211c-cacb-11ea-a4b9-4a19d9b965b2",
  "pull": "master:5a529aa3a0dd3a050c5302329681e871ef6c162e,93063:c25e430df7771a96c9a004d8500473a4f2ef55d3",
  "repo-version": "v1.20.0-alpha.0.261+06ea384605f172",
  "timestamp": 1595278460,
  "repos": {
    "k8s.io/kubernetes": "master:5a529aa3a0dd3a050c5302329681e871ef6c162e,93063:c25e430df7771a96c9a004d8500473a4f2ef55d3",
    "k8s.io/release": "master"
  },
  "version": "v1.20.0-alpha.0.261+06ea384605f172"
}

Finished.json Bootstrap

Fields	Content
timestamp	epoch
passed	bool (job success)
version	If version is in metadata, set from metadata same as job-version
result	‘SUCCESS’ or “FAILURE’ depending on passed
job-version (dep)	If not existing and not ‘unknown’… from metadata, try ‘job-version’ then ‘version’
metadata	exact same as `repo-version`
metadata.repo-commit	Git rev-parse HEAD (for k8s)
metadata.repos	Same as started ‘comes from –repo= args’
metadata.infra-commit	Git rev-parse HEAD (for test-infra)
metadata.repo	main repo for job
metadata.job-version	Same as job version from above
metadata.revision	Same as job-version
Ex

{
  "timestamp": 1596732481,
  "version": "v1.20.0-alpha.0.519+e825f0a86103a6",
  "result": "SUCCESS",
  "passed": true,
  "job-version": "v1.20.0-alpha.0.519+e825f0a86103a6",
  "metadata": {
    "repo-commit": "e825f0a86103a6de00ebd20e158274c4fa625a34",
    "repos": {
      "k8s.io/kubernetes": "master:382107e6c84374b229e6188207ef026621286aa2,93714:19ff4d5a9a9b2df60019854f119e269ee035bbee"
    },
    "infra-commit": "1b7fbb373",
    "repo": "k8s.io/kubernetes",
    "job-version": "v1.20.0-alpha.0.519+e825f0a86103a6",
    "revision": "v1.20.0-alpha.0.519+e825f0a86103a6"
  }
}

Started.json PodUtil

Fields	Content
timestamp	epoch
repo-version (dep) prob should use repo-commit	If refs in job, get SHA for ref else use downward api to get main SHA
job-version (dep)	Never set
pull	Pr number primary is testing, first pull in Spec Pull list
repo-commit	unset (but shouldn’t be)
repos	For Ref, ExtraRef add Org/Repo: Ref
node	unset
metadata	misc
Ex

{
  "timestamp": 1595277241,
  "pull": "93264",
  "repos": {
    "kubernetes/kubernetes": "master:5feab0aa1e592ab413b461bc3ad08a6b74a427b4,93264:5dd9241d43f256984358354d1fec468f274f9ac4"
  },
  "metadata": {
    "links": {
      "resultstore": {
        "url": "https://source.cloud.google.com/results/invocations/20688dbb-eb32-47e6-8a49-34734e714f81/targets/test"
      }
    },
    "resultstore": "https://source.cloud.google.com/results/invocations/20688dbb-eb32-47e6-8a49-34734e714f81/targets/test"
  },
  "repo-version": "30f64c5b1fc57a3beb1476f9beb29280166954d1",
  "Pending": false
}

Finished.json PodUtils

Fields	Content
timestamp	epoch
passed	bool
result	SUCCESS, ABORTED, FAILURE
repo-version (dep)	unset
job-version (dep)	unset
revision (dep)	SHA from Refs
metadata	unset
Ex

{
  "timestamp": 1595279434,
  "passed": true,
  "result": "SUCCESS",
  "revision": "5dd9241d43f256984358354d1fec468f274f9ac4"
}

23 - Testing Prow

23.1 - Run Prow integration tests

Run all integration tests

./test/integration/integration-test.sh

Run a specific integration test

./test/integration/integration-test.sh -run=TestIWantToRun

Cleanup

./test/integration/teardown.sh -all

Adding new integration tests

New component

Assume we want to add most-awesome-component (source code in cmd/most-awesome-component).

Add most-awesome-component to the PROW_COMPONENTS, PROW_IMAGES, and PROW_IMAGES_TO_COMPONENTS variables in lib.sh.
- Add the line most-awesome-component to PROW_COMPONENTS.
- Add the line [most-awesome-component]=cmd/most-awesome-component to PROW_IMAGES.
- Add the line [most-awesome-component]=most-awesome-component to PROW_IMAGES_TO_COMPONENTS.
- Explanation: PROW_COMPONENTS lists which components are deployed into the cluster, PROW_IMAGES describes where the source code is located for each component (in order to build them), and finally PROW_IMAGES_TO_COMPONENTS defines the relationship between the first two variables (so that the test framework knows what to redeploy depending on what image has changed). As an example, the deck and deck-tenanted components (in PROW_COMPONENTS) both use the deck image (defined in PROW_IMAGES_TO_COMPONENTS), so they are both redeployed every time you change something in cmd/deck (defined in PROW_IMAGES).
Set up Kubernetes Deployment and Service configurations inside the [configuration folder][config/prow/cluster] for your new component. This way the test cluster will pick it up when it deploys Prow components.
- If you want to deploy an existing Prow component used in production (i.e., https://prow.k8s.io), you can reuse (symlink) the configurations used in production. See the examples in [configuration folder][config/prow/cluster].
- Remember to use localhost:5001/most-awesome-component for the image: ... field in the Kubernetes configurations to make the test cluster use the freshly-built image.

New tests

Tests are written under the test directory. They are named with the pattern <COMPONENT>_test.go*. Continuing the example above, you would add new tests in most-awesome-component_test.go

Check that your new test is working

Add or edit new tests (e.g., func TestMostAwesomeComponent(t *testing.T) {...}) in most-awesome-component_test.go.
Run ./test/integration/integration-test.sh -run=TestMostAwesomeComponent to bring up the test cluster and to only test your new test named TestMostAwesomeComponent.
If you need to make changes to most-awesome-component_test.go (and not the component itself), run ./test/integration/integration-test.sh -run=TestMostAwesomeComponent -no-setup. The -no-setup will ensure that the test framework avoid redeploying the test cluster.
- If you do need to make changes to the Prow component, run ./test/integration/integration-test.sh -run=TestMostAwesomeComponent -build=most-awesome-component so that cmd/most-awesome-component is recompiled and redeployed into the cluster before running TestMostAwesomeComponent.

If Step 2 succeeds and there is nothing more to do, you’re done! If not (and your tests still need some tweaking), repeat steps 1 and 3 as needed.

How it works

In short, the integration-test.sh script creates a KIND Kubernetes cluster, runs all available integration tests, and finally deletes the cluster.

Recall that Prow is a collection of services (Prow components) that can be deployed into a Kubernetes cluster. KIND provides an environment where we can deploy certain Prow components, and then from the integration tests we can create a Kubernetes Client to talk to this deployment of Prow.

Note that the integration tests do not test all components (we need to fix this). The PROW_COMPONENTS variable is a list of components currently tested. These components are compiled and deployed into the test cluster on every invocation of integration-test.sh.

Each tested component needs a Kubernetes configuration so that KIND understands how to deploy it into the cluster, but that’s about it (more on this below). The main thing to keep in mind is that the integration tests must be hermetic and reproducible. For this reason, all components that are tested must be configured so that they do not attempt to reach endpoints that are outside of the cluster. For example, this is why some Prow components have a -github-endpoint=... flag that you can use — this way these components can be instructed to talk to the fakeghserver deployed inside the cluster instead of trying to talk to GitHub.

Code layout

.
├── cmd # Binaries for fake services deployed into the test cluster along with actual Prow components.
│   ├── fakegerritserver # Fake Gerrit.
│   ├── fakeghserver # Fake GitHub.
│   └── fakegitserver # Fake low-level Git server. Can theoretically act as the backend for fakeghserver or fakegerritserver.
├── config # Kubernetes configuration files.
│   └── prow # Prow configuration for the test cluster.
│       ├── cluster # KIND test cluster configurations.
│       └── jobs # Static Prow jobs. Some tests use these definitions to run Prow jobs inside the test cluster.
├── internal
│   └── fakegitserver
└── test # The actual integration tests to run.
    └── testdata # Test data.

23.1.1 - Fake Git Server (FGS)

FGS is actually not a fake at all. It is a real web server that serves real Git repositories them over HTTP. FGS wraps around the vanilla git http-backend subcommand that comes with Git, calling it as a CGI executable. It supports both read (e.g., git clone, git fetch) and write (e.g., git push) operations against it.

FGS is used for integration tests. See TestClonerefs for an example.

Usage in Integration Testing

The fakegitserver.go file is built automatically by hack/prowimagebuilder, and we deploy it to the KIND cluster. Inside the cluster, it accepts web traffic at the endpoint http://fakegitserver.default (http://localhost/fakegitserver from outside of the KIND cluster).

There are 2 routes:

/repo/<REPO_NAME>: endpoint for Git clients to interact (git clone, git fetch, git push). E.g., git clone http://fakegitserver.default/repo/foo. Internally, FGS serves all Git repo folders under -git-repos-parent-dir on disk and serves them for the /repo route with the git-http-backend CGI script.
POST /setup-repo: endpoint for creating new Git repos on the server; you just need to send a JSON payload like this:

{
  "name": "foo",
  "overwrite": true,
  "script": "echo hello world > README; git add README; git commit -m update"
}

Here is a cURL example:

# mkFoo is a plaintext file containing the JSON from above.
$ curl http://localhost/fakegitserver/setup-repo -d @mkFoo
commit c1e4e5bb8ba0e5b16147450a75347a27e5980222
Author: abc <d@e.f>
Date:   Thu May 19 12:34:56 2022 +0000

    update

Notice how the server responds with a git log output of the just-created repo to ease debugging in case repos are not created the way you expect them to be created.

During integration tests, each test creates repo(s) using the /setup-repo endpoint as above. Care must be taken to not reuse the same repository name, as the test cases (e.g., the test cases in TestClonerefs) all run in parallel and can clobber each other’s repo creation setp.

Allowing Push Access

Although this is not (yet) used in tests, push access is enabled for all served repos. This is achieved by setting the http.receivepack Git configuration option to true for each repo found under -git-repos-parent-dir. This is because the git http-backend script does not by default allow anonymous push access unless the aforementioned option is set to true on a per-repo basis.

Allowing Fetching of Commit SHAs

By default the CGI script will only serve references that are “advertised” (such as those references under refs/heads/* or refs/pull/*/head). However, FGS also sets the uploadpack.allowAnySHA1InWant option to true to allow Git clients (such as clonerefs) to fetch commits by their SHA.

Local Usage (for debugging)

FGS has 2 requirements:

the path to the local git binary installation, and
the path to a folder containing Git repositories to be served (can be an empty directory, or pre-populated).

By default port 8888 is used, although this can also be configured with -port.

Example:

$ go run fakegitserver.go -h
Usage of /tmp/go-build2317700172/b001/exe/fakegitserver:
  -git-binary git
        Path to the git binary. (default "/usr/bin/git")
  -git-repos-parent-dir string
        Path to the parent folder containing all Git repos to serve over HTTP. (default "/git-repo")
  -port int
        Port to listen on. (default 8888)

$ go run fakegitserver.go -git-repos-parent-dir <PATH_TO_REPOS> -git-binary <PATH_TO_GIT>
{"component":"unset","file":"/home/someuser/go/src/sigs.k8s.io/prow/pkg/test/integration/fakegitserver/fakegitserver.go:111","func":"main.main","level":"info","msg":"Start server","severity":"info","time":"2022-05-22T20:31:38-07:00"}

In this example, http://localhost:8888 is the HTTP address of FGS:

# Clone "foo" repo, assuming it exists locally under `-git-repos-parent-dir`.
$ git clone http://localhost:8888/repo/foo
$ cd foo
$ git log # or any other arbitrary Git command
# ... do some Git operations
$ git push

That’s it!

Local Usage with Docker and Ko (for debugging)

It may be helpful to run FGS in a containerized environment for debugging. First install ko itself. Then cd to the fakegitserver folder (same folder as this README.md file), and run:

# First CD to the root of the repo, because the .ko.yaml configuration (unfortunately)
# depends on relative paths that can only work from the root of the repo.
$ cd ${PATH_TO_REPO_ROOT}
$ docker run -it --entrypoint=sh -p 8123:8888 $(ko build --local sigs.k8s.io/prow/pkg/test/integration/fakegitserver)

The -p 8123:8888 allows you to talk to the containerized instance of fakegitserver over port 8123 on the host.

Custom Base Image

To use a custom base image for FGS, change the baseImageOverrides entry for fakegitserver in .ko.yaml like this:

baseImageOverrides:
  # ... other entries ...
  sigs.k8s.io/prow/pkg/test/integration/fakegitserver: gcr.io/my/base/image:tag

If you want ko to pick up a local Docker image on your machine, rename the image to have a ko.local prefix. For example, like this:

baseImageOverrides:
  sigs.k8s.io/prow/pkg/test/integration/fakegitserver: ko.local/my/base/image:tag

24 - Legacy Snapshot

Legacy docs

Legacy Snapshot

Historically, almost all of Prow’s documentation resided in the kubernetes/test-infra (“k/t-i”) repo. As part of the migration effort, those docs were replaced with “tombstones” in https://github.com/kubernetes/test-infra/pull/27818, with a pointer to this page.

This page captures Prow documentation in the k/t-i repository as of October 25, 2022. All Markdown files have been copied in along with their directory structure here.

How you can help

The files in this snapshot should probably be reorganized around logical delineations, and not the (inherited) filesystem delineations from k/t-i. This is an ongoing effort and the goal is to one day delete this snapshot altogether (to be replaced by equivalent documentation outside of this folder).