User Objects

Changes

Incoming Changes all have a who attribute attached to them that specifies which developer is responsible for that Change. When a Change is first rendered, the who attribute is parsed and added to the database if it doesn’t exist or checked against an existing user. The who attribute is formatted in different ways depending on the version control system that the Change came from.

git

who attributes take the form Full Name <Email>.

svn

who attributes are of the form Username.

hg

who attributes are free-form strings, but usually adhere to similar conventions as git attributes (Full Name <Email>).

cvs

who attributes are of the form Username.

darcs

who attributes contain an Email and may also include a Full Name like git attributes.

bzr

who attributes are free-form strings like hg, and can include a Username, Email, and/or Full Name.

Tools

For managing users manually, use the buildbot user command, which allows you to add, remove, update, and show various attributes of users in the Buildbot database (see Command-line Tool).

Uses

Correlating the various bits and pieces that Buildbot views as users also means that one attribute of a user can be translated into another. This provides a more complete view of users throughout Buildbot.

One such use is being able to find email addresses based on a set of Builds to notify users through the MailNotifier. This process is explained more clearly in Email Addresses.

Another way to utilize User Objects is through UsersAuth for web authentication. To use UsersAuth, you need to set a bb_username and bb_password via the buildbot user command line tool to check against. The password will be encrypted before storing in the database along with other user attributes.