Cocoon is a Dart App Engine custom runtime (backend) with a frontend of Flutter apps (build and repository dashboard) and Angular 2 Dart (performance dashboard) apps. Cocoon coordinates and aggregates the results of flutter/flutter builds. It is not designed to help developers build Flutter apps. More importantly, Cocoon is not a Google product.

Developing cocoon

Install Google Cloud SDK
Install Flutter
Learn App Engine for Dart
Learn Flutter
Learn Angular 2 for Dart - Only for performance dashboard

Running local dev server

This is useful for developing backend functionality locally. This local dev server can be connected to the frontend applications by running dart dev/deploy.dart --project test --version test and answer N to deploying to AppEngine. This will build the frontend files and copy them to the directory the server will serve them out of.

Set the environment variables GCLOUD_PROJECT and GCLOUD_KEY. Running the following command will give more explaination on what these values should be.

Make sure to create a service account in the GCP dashboard

cd app_dart && dart bin/server.dart

If you see Serving requests at 0.0.0.0:8080 the dev server is working.

Building Cocoon for deployment

The following command will run tests and build the app, and provide instructions for deploying to Google App Engine.

cd app_dart
dart dev/deploy.dart --project {PROJECT} --version {VERSION}

You can test the new version by accessing {VERSION}-dot-flutter-dashboard.appspot.com in your browser. If the result is satisfactory, the new version can be activated by using the Cloud Console UI: https://pantheon.corp.google.com/appengine/versions?project=flutter-dashboard&serviceId=default

Optional flags

--profile: Deploy a profile mode of app_flutter application for debugging purposes.

Design

Cocoon creates a checklist for each Flutter commit. A checklist is made of multiple tasks. Tasks are performed by agents. An agent is a computer capable of running a subset of tasks in the checklist. To perform a task an agent reserves it in Cocoon. Cocoon issues tasks according to agents' capabilities. Each task has a list of required capabilities. For example, a task might require that a physical Android device is attached to an agent. It then lists "has-physical-android-phone" capability as required. Multiple agents may share the same capability. Cocoon will distribute tasks amongst agents. That's how Cocoon scales.

Infra Tools

Infra Agent Dashboard

Creating an agent

To create an agent in the dashboard, it needs an agentId and a list of capabilities (comma delimited). Clicking the floating action button will show a create agent dialog.

An example of a valid agent would be agentId=bot-with-devices and capabilities=has-android-phone,has-iphone.

IMPORTANT: This returns an authentication token, and prints it to the console. Cocoon does not store the token, so copy it immediately and add it to the agent's configuration file. If the token is lost or compromised, authorize the agent to generate a new token.

Authorizing an agent

Click on the dropdown for the agent, and click authorize agent. This will print a new generated token to the console.

IMPORTANT: See the IMPORTANT note in "Creating an agent". Also, note that this command invalidates any previously issued authentication tokens for the given agent. Only one authentication token is valid at any given moment in time. Therefore, if the agent is currently using a previously issued token its API requests will be rejected until it switches to using the newly created token.

Forcing a refresh from GitHub

Cocoon is driven by commits made to https://github.com/flutter/flutter repo. It periodically syncs new commits. If you need to manually force a refresh, query https://flutter-dashboard.appspot.com/api/refresh-github-commits.

Hixie / cocoon