Last week without any fanfare, we closed bug 749421 - Allow test slaves to save and upload files somewhere. This has actually been working well for a few months now, it's just taken a while to close it out properly, and I completely failed to announce it anywhere. mea culpa!

This was a really important project, and deserves some fanfare! cue trumpets, parades and skywriters

The goal of this project was to make it easier for developers to get important data out of the test machines reporting to TBPL. Previously the only real output from a test job was the textual log. That meant if you wanted a screen shot from a failing test, or the dump from a crashing process, you needed to format it somehow into the log. For screen shots we would base64 encode a png image and print it to the log as a data URL!

With blobber successfully running now, it's now possible to upload extra files from your test runs on TBPL. Things like screen shots, minidump logs and zip files are already supported.

Getting new files uploaded is pretty straightforward. If the environment variable MOZ_UPLOAD_DIR is set in your test's environment, you can simply copy files there and they will be uploaded after the test run is complete. Links to the files are output in the log. e.g.

15:21:18     INFO -  (blobuploader) - INFO - TinderboxPrint: Uploaded 70485077-b08a-4530-8d4b-c85b0d6f9bc7.dmp to http://mozilla-releng-blobs.s3.amazonaws.com/blobs/mozilla-inbound/sha512/5778e0be8288fe8c91ab69dd9c2b4fbcc00d0ccad4d3a8bd78d3abe681af13c664bd7c57705822a5585655e96ebd999b0649d7b5049fee1bd75a410ae6ee55af

Your thanks and praise should go to our awesome intern, Mihai Tabara, who did most of the work here.

Most test jobs are already supported; if you're unsure if the job type you're interested is supported, just search for MOZ_UPLOAD_DIR in the log on tbpl. If it's not there and you need it, please file a bug!