Task Kinds

This section lists and documents the available task kinds.

Builds

Builds are currently implemented by the legacy kind.

Tests

Test tasks for Gecko products are divided into several kinds, but share a common implementation. The process goes like this, based on a set of YAML files named in kind.yml:

• For each build task, determine the related test platforms based on the build platform. For example, a Windows 2010 build might be tested on Windows 7 and Windows 10. Each test platform specifies a “test set” indicating which tests to run. This is configured in the file named test-platforms.yml.
• Each test set is expanded to a list of tests to run. This is configured in the file named by test-sets.yml.
• Each named test is looked up in the file named by tests.yml to find a test description. This test description indicates what the test does, how it is reported to treeherder, and how to perform the test, all in a platform-independent fashion.
• Each test description is converted into one or more tasks. This is performed by a sequence of transforms defined in the transforms key in kind.yml. See Transforms: for more information on these transforms.
• The resulting tasks become a part of the task graph.

Important

This process generates all test jobs, regardless of tree or try syntax. It is up to a later stage of the task-graph generation (the target set) to select the tests that will actually be performed.

desktop-test

The desktop-test kind defines tests for Desktop builds. Its tests.yml defines the full suite of desktop tests and their particulars, leaving it to the transforms to determine how those particulars apply to Linux, OS X, and Windows.

android-test

The android-test kind defines tests for Android builds.

It is very similar to desktop-test, but the details of running the tests differ substantially, so they are defined separately.

legacy

The legacy kind is the old, templated-yaml-based task definition mechanism. It is still used for builds and generic tasks, but not for long!

docker-image

Tasks of the docker-image kind build the Docker images in which other Docker tasks run.

The tasks to generate each docker image have predictable labels: build-docker-image-<name>.

Docker images are built from subdirectories of testing/docker, using docker build. There is currently no capability for one Docker image to depend on another in-tree docker image, without uploading the latter to a Docker repository

The task definition used to create the image-building tasks is given in image.yml in the kind directory, and is interpreted as a YAML Template.