Adding a new fedmsg message type

First, figure out how you’re going to publish the message? Is it from a shell script or from a long running process?

If its from shell script, you need to just add a fedmsg-logger statement to the script. Remember to set the --modname and --topic for your new message’s fully-qualified topic.

If its from a python process, you need to just add a fedmsg.publish(..) call. The same concerns about modname and topic apply here.

If this is a short-lived python process, you’ll want to add active=True to the call to fedmsg.publish(..). This will make the fedmsg lib "actively" reach out to our fedmsg-relay running on busgateway01.

If it is a long-running python process (like a WSGI thread), then you don’t need to pass any extra arguments. You don’t want it to reach out to the fedmsg-relay if possible. Your process will require that some "endpoints" are created for it in /etc/fedmsg.d/. More on that below.

You need to make sure that the machine this is running on has a cert and key that can be read by the program to sign its message. If you don’t have a cert already, then you need to create it in the private repo. Ask a sysadmin-main member.

Then you need to declare those certs in the fedmsg_certs data structure stored typically in our ansible group_vars/ for this service. Declare both the name of the cert, what group and user it should be owned by, and in the can_send: section, declare the list of topics that this cert should be allowed to publish.

If this is a long-running python process that is not passing active=True to the call to fedmsg.publish(..), then you have to also declare endpoints for it. You do that by specifying the fedmsg_wsgi_procs and fedmsg_wsgi_vars in the group_vars for your service. The iptables rules and fedmsg endpoints should be automatically created for you on the next playbook run.

At this point, you can push the change out to production and be publishing messages "okay". Everything should be fine.

However, your message will show up blank in datagrepper, in IRC, and in FMN, and everywhere else we try to render it. You must then follow up and write a new Processor for it in the fedmsg_meta library we maintain: https://github.com/fedora-infra/fedmsg_meta_fedora_infrastructure

You also must write a test case for it there. The docs listing all topics we publish at http://fedora-fedmsg.rtfd.org/ is automatically generated from the test suite. Please don’t forget this.

Lastly, you should cut a release of fedmsg_meta and deploy it using the playbooks/manual/upgrade/fedmsg.yml playbook, which should update all the relevant hosts.

If the process publishing the new message lives outside our main network, you have to jump through more hoops. Look at abrt, koschei, and copr for examples of how to configure this (you need a special firewall rule, and they need to be configured to talk to our "inbound gateway" running on the proxies.