2.6.1 Buildslave Options

There are a handful of options you might want to use when creating the buildslave with the buildslave create-slave <options> DIR <params> command. You can type buildslave create-slave --help for a summary. To use these, just include them on the buildslave create-slave command line, like this:

     buildslave create-slave --umask=022 ~/buildslave buildmaster.example.org:42012 myslavename mypasswd

--usepty

This is a boolean flag that tells the buildslave whether to launch child processes in a PTY or with regular pipes (the default) when the master does not specify. This option is deprecated, as this particular parameter is better specified on the master.

--umask

This is a string (generally an octal representation of an integer) which will cause the buildslave process' “umask” value to be set shortly after initialization. The “twistd” daemonization utility forces the umask to 077 at startup (which means that all files created by the buildslave or its child processes will be unreadable by any user other than the buildslave account). If you want build products to be readable by other accounts, you can add --umask=022 to tell the buildslave to fix the umask after twistd clobbers it. If you want build products to be writable by other accounts too, use --umask=000, but this is likely to be a security problem.

--keepalive

This is a number that indicates how frequently “keepalive” messages should be sent from the buildslave to the buildmaster, expressed in seconds. The default (600) causes a message to be sent to the buildmaster at least once every 10 minutes. To set this to a lower value, use e.g. --keepalive=120.

If the buildslave is behind a NAT box or stateful firewall, these messages may help to keep the connection alive: some NAT boxes tend to forget about a connection if it has not been used in a while. When this happens, the buildmaster will think that the buildslave has disappeared, and builds will time out. Meanwhile the buildslave will not realize than anything is wrong.

--maxdelay

This is a number that indicates the maximum amount of time the buildslave will wait between connection attempts, expressed in seconds. The default (300) causes the buildslave to wait at most 5 minutes before trying to connect to the buildmaster again.

--log-size

This is the size in bytes when to rotate the Twisted log files.

--log-count

This is the number of log rotations to keep around. You can either specify a number or None (the default) to keep all twistd.log files around.