Understanding Jenkins builds

This page documents what different Jenkins builds actually run from the GROMACS source tree. The purpose is two-fold:

• Provide information on how to interpret Jenkins failures and how to run the same tasks locally to diagnose issues.
• Provide information on what changes in the build system (or other parts of the repository) need special care to not break Jenkins builds.

cppcheck build

This build runs the cppcheck static analysis tool. Any issues found mark the build unstable, and can be browsed in Jenkins.

It runs cmake to generate the build system, and then builds the cppcheck target. Nothing is compiled by this target, it only runs cppcheck for the designated source files. The CMake configuration options do not affect the set of files checked, but they do affect the checked code through config.h and such.

Documentation build

This build builds various types of documentation:

• PDF reference manual using LaTeX
• Doxygen documentation extracted from the source code
• Set of HTML pages containing an installation guide, a user guide, and a developer guide, as well as links to the above. This set of HTML pages can be browsed from Jenkins.
• Man pages
• INSTALL text file

The last three require building the gmx binary and running it, so compilation failures will also show in this build. All log files that contain warnings are archived as artifacts in the build, and presence of any warnings marks the build unstable. Brief description of which part failed is reported back to Gerrit.

Additionally, the build runs some source code checks that rely on the Doxygen documentation. See the description of the check-source target in Source tree checker scripts.

Using Doxygen provides general guidelines for Doxygen usage, which can be helpful in understanding and solving Doxygen warnings and some of the check-source issues. Guidelines for #include directives provides guidelines for #include order and style, which is another part of check-source checks.

Technically, the documentation build runs admin/build-docs.sh. See that file for details of what it exactly builds and how. Most changes in the documentation build system will require changes in this script, but Jenkins configuration should be more static.

uncrustify build

This build checks the source code for formatting such as consistent indentation and use of braces, as well as for copyright headers. See Guidelines for code formatting for the guidelines that are enforced.

Technically, the build simply runs admin/run-uncrustify.sh to check the formatting in the changes for the commit. If the any changes are required, the build is marked unstable. If the script completely fails (should be rare), the build fails. A file with issues found by the script is archived as an artifact in the build, and a summary is reported back to Gerrit (or the actual issues if there are only a few). See Automatic source code formatting for more details on uncrustify and on scripts to run it.