October 2013 Summaries

Semaphore, a product of Rendered Text, is set to expand its development team to nearly double its size, enhancing its capacity to deliver new features, speed improvements, and faster support. Originally founded with a focus on creating great web services using Ruby and other open-source tools, Semaphore has grown organically from a small team to a larger one, driven by a passion for user experience and technical challenges. Despite a history of slow, organic growth due to bootstrapping constraints, the company has decided to accelerate its development efforts in response to a rapidly growing customer base and the demands of managing a distributed system. With the addition of two new developers, the team is eager to implement a long list of planned features and improvements while continuing to engage with user feedback, promising exciting developments for Semaphore users in the near future.

In response to intermittent SSL-related errors encountered during the `bundle install` process on Semaphore's build platform, the RubyGems package was upgraded to version 2.1.9 across all provided Rubies. The issue, which affected users sourcing rubygems.org via HTTPS, was characterized by SSL certificate verification failures, potentially indicating a missing CA certificate. While the problem was challenging to debug due to its random occurrence, the upgrade appears to have resolved it, with further monitoring and potential backporting of the ca-certificates package being considered if required. A temporary workaround involves switching the Gemfile source to HTTP. Additionally, JRuby was updated to version 1.7.5, and efforts were made to align SSL configurations, including setting the SSL_CERT_FILE environment variable and creating necessary symlinks. The issue was ultimately rectified with a fix on the RubyGems infrastructure.

A new feature has been introduced that allows users to execute commands at the end of each thread, regardless of whether the build commands succeed or fail. This can be set up by designating a command as "Post-thread" within the project's build settings. This functionality is particularly useful for tasks such as uploading assets to S3 or analyzing the test.log when troubleshooting failed scenarios. Additionally, a new environment variable called SEMAPHORE_THREAD_RESULT is available for these commands, indicating whether the thread passed or failed. Users interested in discussing the feature are encouraged to join the Discord community.

An update to the build platform has been released, featuring new versions of git and Firefox, among other enhancements, and users are advised to update their selenium-webdriver gem accordingly. For a comprehensive overview of all modifications, the platform changelog provides detailed information. Additionally, there is an invitation for users to engage in discussions about the update on Discord.