4.8.1 When Buildslaves Go Missing

Sometimes, the buildslaves go away. One very common reason for this is when the buildslave process is started once (manually) and left running, but then later the machine reboots and the process is not automatically restarted.

If you'd like to have the administrator of the buildslave (or other people) be notified by email when the buildslave has been missing for too long, just add the notify_on_missing= argument to the BuildSlave definition:

     c['slaves'] = [BuildSlave('bot-solaris', 'solarispasswd',
                               notify_on_missing="bob@example.com"),
                   ]

By default, this will send email when the buildslave has been disconnected for more than one hour. Only one email per connection-loss event will be sent. To change the timeout, use missing_timeout= and give it a number of seconds (the default is 3600).

You can have the buildmaster send email to multiple recipients: just provide a list of addresses instead of a single one:

     c['slaves'] = [BuildSlave('bot-solaris', 'solarispasswd',
                               notify_on_missing=["bob@example.com",
                                                  "alice@example.org"],
                               missing_timeout=300, # notify after 5 minutes
                               ),
                   ]

The email sent this way will use a MailNotifier (see MailNotifier) status target, if one is configured. This provides a way for you to control the “from” address of the email, as well as the relayhost (aka “smarthost”) to use as an SMTP server. If no MailNotifier is configured on this buildmaster, the buildslave-missing emails will be sent using a default configuration.

Note that if you want to have a MailNotifier for buildslave-missing emails but not for regular build emails, just create one with builders=[], as follows:

     from buildbot.status import mail
     m = mail.MailNotifier(fromaddr="buildbot@localhost", builders=[],
                           relayhost="smtp.example.org")
     c['status'].append(m)
     c['slaves'] = [BuildSlave('bot-solaris', 'solarispasswd',
                               notify_on_missing="bob@example.com"),
                   ]