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Tooling, automation and developer experience

Kunal Mehta edited this page Jan 6, 2023 · 30 revisions

Work in progress

This page serves two purposes:

  1. Describe abstractly what our interactive (CLI) and automated (CI) tools are for across the repositories that compose the SecureDrop project.
    • This is in contrast to any given repository's readme, which describes concretely how to use these tools in that context.
  2. Track (a) inconsistencies to resolve across repositories and (b) new features, goals, or principles to implement.

While some of this material may eventually be reflected in the developer documentation, for now it is a (public) "living document" rather than a releasable documentation artifact.

Goals and principles

  • It should be easy to run the same thing that CI is running. Conversely, CI runs what you're running locally.
  • Standard tooling (e.g. ShellCheck) should be available opportunistically: even if a project has no shell scripts yet, ShellCheck should kick in automatically if it acquires one.
  • We're using Make as a command-runner, not for any real build logic.
    • Make's main pro is that it's universal, everyone knows "make test", etc. and already has it installed.
    • We do use make as a build tool for client localization targets, but that's not necessary.
  • We should use tool-specific configuration (e.g. Black, pytest) rather than committing complex command invocations to Make targets.
    • Makes it easier for new developers who already have experience using the tool to also use the tool here.
    • Helps with other tooling, e.g. IDEs that know how to use the tool in the standard way (e.g. PyCharm can run black to autoformat every time you save a file), but won't know about our wrapper that contains our configuration arguments.

CI overview

Across projects/repositories, we use CI to accomplish the following tasks in the following ways (including the following exceptions/gaps):

Repository securedrop securedrop-client securedrop-proxy securedrop-export securedrop-log securedrop-workstation securedrop-updater
CI image debian circleci/python:3.7-buster debian debian
Python version
Runs ShellCheck yes
...on any and all shell files present, or passes if none
Runs mypy yes, config partially in shell wrapper yes, config in Makefile yes, config in Makefile ‼️no ‼️no
...in strict mode, including Qt
Runs Black+isort yes, config in Makefile yes yes, config in Makefile yes black w/ config in Makefile, ‼️no isort ‼️no
Runs flake8 yes yes yes yes ‼️no
Runs safety yes, complex Makefile command yes, complex Makefile command yes, complex Makefile command yes, complex Makefile command yes, complex Makefile command
Extracts source strings for localization yes no no no
...if babel.cfg is present, otherwise passes
Caches CI jobs yes, but inefficiently
CI jobs are grouped in workflows
CI jobs are parameterized in matrices
...

Tooling overview

Across projects/repositories, we use Makefiles and shell scripts to accomplish the following tasks in the following ways (including the following exceptions/gaps):

Repository securedrop securedrop-client ...
Create a Python venv make venv make venv
Set up Git hooks make add-hooks make hooks
Run in a development environment make dev ./run.sh
Lint (etc.)
Run tests make test make test
...
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