Tinderbox (software)

For other uses, see Tinderbox (disambiguation).

Tinderbox

Screenshot  File:Tinderbox-firefox.png Tinderbox at Mozilla Firefox project
Developer(s)	Mozilla Corporation, Mozilla Foundation
Operating system	Cross-platform
Development status	Active
Type	Continuous integration
License	Mozilla Public License
Website	http://www.mozilla.org/tinderbox.html

Tinderbox is a software suite that provides continuous integration capability. Tinderbox allows developers to manage software builds and to correlate build failures on various platforms and configurations with particular code changes.

Tinderbox is described as "a detective tool for software development". It allows the developer to see what is happening in the source tree. It shows who checked in what (by asking Bonsai); what platforms have built successfully; what platforms are broken and exactly how they are broken (the build logs); and the state of the files that made up the build (cvsblame).

Tinderbox is composed of a server with clients running builds and reporting status via mail. The server receives mail from tinderbox clients in the form of

tinderbox: tree: SeaMonkey
tinderbox: builddate: 1021331520
(...)
tinderbox: status: success
tinderbox: END
(full build log)

The server then constructs a table with time on the vertical axis and the various builds on the horizontal axis.

Tinderbox is maintained and hosted by the Mozilla Corporation. Well-known projects utilizing tinderbox technology include Mozilla and FreeBSD. It is written in Perl and is released under the Mozilla Public License, making it free and open source software.

General use of the term

By extension, "tinderbox" is also a name for machines which are exclusively or mainly used for continuous build integration/testing without necessarily employing the tinderbox software suite to do so.

See also

• Bugzilla
• BuildBot

External links

• Mozilla's Tinderbox homepage, describing version 1
• Ken Estes's Tinderbox 2.0 server re-write
• John Keiser's Tinderbox 3
• Tinderbox3 documentation on Mozilla's Bugzilla