Rollers

What is a roller?

A roller is an infra job that updates the revision of a pinned project (or version of a pinned CIPD package) in a repository with submodules or an Android Repo Tool manifest. The Pigweed Infra team generally maintains the logic and configuration of rollers, while various project and/or package owners across are responsible for keeping them green.

Our rollers

Rollers from Pigweed into downstream projects can be seen on the Pigweed Console. Many more rollers are visible when logged in using an @google.com account than when not.

Rollers specific to individual downstream projects can be found by browsing the builder visualization and looking under the “roll” columns.

How do rollers work?

Project rollers will poll Gitiles periodically (often every three hours, but this is configurable) for new commits to watched repositories. Package rollers will poll CIPD at their configured frequencies for new packages which match their watched refs (e.g. ‘latest’).

When a new change is detected, luci-scheduler emits a ‘trigger’ for the roller. The ‘trigger’ does not necessarily invoke the roller immediately as luci-scheduler is configured to only allow a single job of each roller to be running at once. It will batch triggers until there is no job running, then create a roller job with the properties of the latest trigger in the batch.

Once the roller job begins, it creates a change which updates the relevant project or package pin(s) and attempts to submit the change via CQ. If the CQ run fails, then the roller will abandon that change. If the CQ run succeeds, the change is submitted and the roller succeeds.

On most hosts, rollers vote on the Bot-Commit label which bypasses the Code-Review requirement. On other hosts, rollers vote on Code-Review, or Gerrit is configured to not enforce the Code-Review requirement for changes uploaded by the roller.

In the event of a CQ failure, if the roller attempts to re-roll the exact same revision or package(s), it will re-use the existing change and only re-run the failing portions of CQ.

How do I fix a roller breakage?

Most rollers will fix themselves. Failing rollers are periodically rerun by the “rerunner” builders, so any flaky tests or temporary failures should resolve themselves.

However, if you are a Googler on a team using Pigweed’s infrastructure, you should be able to manually trigger a roller by finding it in the Builder Viz and clicking the “scheduler” link. (You may need to log in to luci-scheduler.) This is batched with all other ‘triggers’ as to not disrupt the normal roller flow, but will allow you to restart the roll process.

How do I disable a roller? Create a new roller?

(Googlers only) See go/pw-config-tasks. But most of the time the appropriate action is to file a bug at go/pw-infra-bug.