Buildbot Reviews & Product Details

There’s a learning curve in buildbot as it’s written mostly using Python over the twisted libraries. Unlike jenkins, even for a small configuration change you need to interact with the python code. The way schedulers or pollers are configured, every thing is very flexible and does not restrict you to UI. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The UI could have been more intuitive to show some extra details such as some more build related information on the builder’s page itself. It’s not that it requires a major change in the upstream code but getting that as a package from the buildbot team will add more confidence to it.

Another bug that I have been seeing with buildbot 2.7.0 is the reconfiguration issue. When a reconfiguration is done at the time the polling is happening in the background, the process hangs and then it keeps saying “reconfiguration is going on for xxx seconds.” The buildbot needs to be restarted then for the new changes to takr effect. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Buildbot is easy to use and hooks up with GitHub perfectly. We can have our custom implementations of secret service and Buildbot does a great job of concealing it Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Buildbot does not have the API calling facility for enterprise github. It has to be done via UI. There are some minor bugs you may encounter hence a good opening to contribute to them Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The documentation is rich and easy to read and understand. It makes building a pipeline very easy and accessible. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Using Python, it isn't a language I am familiar with. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Bash scripting intuitively through the API calls. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I sometimes appreciate the GUI nature of Jenkins better and I wish there were more Buildbot examples. Also I don't know why Buildbot doesn't integrate with the popular github and gitlab vendors or bit bucket. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Python, period. Installation and configuration are easy once you find out where the documentation is. Since it uses python it can integrate with any other python tool or library, allowing for very specific and fine grained configuration options. It also is quite easy to maintain once in production. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's online documentation is very sparse and it is very difficult to find docs for a consistent version number. Most of my gripes are with the Buildbot Website itself more than the product. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

This is my favorite build system. It has recently replaced Jenkins as my main build pipeline as for a larger project with several dependencies, it makes it much easier to see the failure cause. Additionally, I enjoyed the fact that it is customizable in the sense that I can code a step that I would like to achieve. Other models such as Jenkins and TeamCity make this pretty hard with the plugin heavy model. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The learning curve to get started with this was much heavier than I expected going into it. To get started on this product, it took twice as long as I had estimated due to the learning curve. As far as look and feel, both this and Jenkins feel pretty dated to TeamCity but then again, not the goal of this software. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is written in Python and it can be heavily customized through configuration file. It supports many operating systems and we were running it even on old HP-UX server with PA-RISC CPUs. Performance was surprisingly good and an old desktop PC was able to run Buildbot master for years. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Flexibility comes with a cost and you have to be a programmer to do something beyond trivial. Some of Buildbot extensions were hard to customize and reuse (MailNotifier, GitPoller) and we ended up writing functionality from scratch.

Web interface did not have support for multiple projects and history of build status over time, we had to build our own.

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Can setup automatic deployment for my python/php applications in less than half an hour, even in minutes.

The deployment process and result can be viewed by different people at the same time.

I can easily setup rollback builder for an application. By ChoiceStringParameter a builder can take backup deployment application path as parameters.

It support basic authentication. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The UI is ugly and not so user friendly.

The code structure isn't simple enough to read, in version after 0.9 the code structure changed a lot, and it takes me lots of time than expected to hack into the code. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Buildbot is a software tool written in python. As a result, it inherits many of the python advantages, namely readability and simple syntax. Furthermore, the core conceptual paradigm of the software is simple and well-documented.

In my experience, the software scaled quite well. We had many more than 30 svn repos attached to a single buildbot instance, with continuous integration across suites of regression tests upon check in. This is critical for an effective CI suite, as it encourages extensive regression testing across a variety of environments, releases, etc.

Finally, as buildbot's dependencies are python and twisted, it is quick and easy to install. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The greatest weakness of buildbot I encountered was the difficulty in debugging the configuration files. While there is a script provided that can provide an accurate yay/nay on if the configuration file will result in a successful run, in practice the error messages it provided did not help greatly in finding the location of syntax errors.

The other issue I had was with adding remote buildslaves. In principle, buildslaves on different machines/architectures can be added so long as they can remotely connect to the buildmaster. This is quite useful for CI across an array of environments. In practice, it was challenging and very error-prone to set this up correctly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Its written in python and the level of customization we have control of. Since its written in python, it integrated very well with us (we are a python shop).

For example, we use github heavily and setup our buildbot to wait for no more pushes on a branch for about 15 seconds before it triggers a build. This feature is simple to setup in buildbot and a complete pain (if at all possible) in jenkins. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The UI is very clunky. Reading the documentation to know how to extend buildbot to post to slack for example, was not easy. Been waiting for a .9.x release a long time because it address some fixes regarding the git poller. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.