Packaging lava-server for distributions

LAVA currently only has official support for Debian packaging. Additional support for other distributions needs someone to maintain the packaging and to maintain a test instance, provide backports and manage migrations to new upstream releases of dependencies like python-django.

Apache distribution support

/etc/apache2/sites-available/lava-server.conf

Aimed at apache2.4 with comments for apache2.2 usage. Edit where necessary and then enable and restart apache to use.

Instance name

  1. Only one instance can be running at any one time.
  2. Instance templates share a common folder: /usr/share/lava-server/templates

LAVA Components

lava meta-package for single instance setup
lava-dev meta-package for developers to build LAVA
lava-server apache and WSGI settings and HTML content
lava-dispatcher dispatches jobs to devices

Package dependencies

Take note of the Debian dependencies - not all are available with pypi and not all are necessarily available in your distribution. A large part of packaging LAVA for a distribution is taking on the maintenance of a variety of dependency modules and packages which do not (yet) exist in the distribution.

Depending on how the distribution is organized, it may take a significant amount of time to get the dependencies uploaded and available in the appropriate suite, release or location. Many of these dependencies will also depend on new packages, so the order of uploads will have to be identified in advance.

Daemon renaming

The web application itself is handled within apache, so to refresh the code running behind the front end, use:

$ sudo apache2ctl restart

The LAVA_SYS_USER has also been renamed from an instance-specific name to lavaserver. lava-server manage can also be run as a normal user or by root. The system user is used just for the filesystem permissions.

There are also daemons for the lava-master and the lava-worker.