Hello,

The Toolforge admin team is happy to announce that the Toolforge Build Service[0] is now available in open beta.

The Build Service is intended to allow more tools to migrate off the Grid Engine and to make the process for deploying code to

Toolforge easier and more flexible, by building container images with the specific dependencies for each tool.

Here are quick highlights of some of the current key features:

1. Build your tool from source code, using you language's dependency management tool, no dockerfiles, no scripts, no manual steps

2. Use industry-wide standards[1] no vendor lock-in by using upstream buildpacks

3. Support for many languages out of the box[2]

4. Envvars - Create and manage environment variables and secrets that are available at runtime.[3]

5. Ability to install packages from the Ubuntu repositories[4]

6. Improved resiliency and resource usage by allowing NFS-less webservices[5], if you don't need NFS

7. Test your image locally, or anywhere[6]

Please review the current known limitations here[7]

We also have a growing list of tutorials for various languages[8]

During this open beta, we invite you to actively participate and share your feedback replying to this thread or through irc, and if you

find any issues or have any feature suggestions, you can use this task template[9].

Your insights will help us enhance and tailor the Build Service to meet the needs of your tools.

The plan is to have this phase run for the next months, and if no big issues are found, promote it to global availability phase 1 (GA1)

while we work on adding automatic triggering and deployment, for which we will do a second round of beta testing for those specific features.

This unblocks the last step to migrate out of the grid, so we request all grid users to give it a try and report any issues they might find,

there's no big changes expected for the currently implemented features, so any work done now will help later.

Thank you for being a part of this journey. We look forward to your invaluable feedback and collaboration as we strive to provide a better developer experience.

[0]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge/Build_Service

[1]: https://buildpacks.io/

[2]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge/Build_Service#Supported_languages
[3]:https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge/Envvars_Service

[4]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge/Build_Service#Installing_Apt_packages
[5]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge/Build_Service#Using_NFS_shared_storage

[6]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge/Build_Service#Testing_locally_(optional)

[7]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge/Build_Service#Known_current_limitations

[8]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge/Build_Service#Tutorials_for_popular_languages

[9]: https://w.wiki/7kpi

Seyram Komla Sapaty

Developer Advocate

Wikimedia Cloud Services