Setting up Gerrit for use with APEX studies

Format

A very specific format of projects, accounts, and groups is used to represent studies, devices, and the relations between them.

study

Each study is represented by a Gerrit project. Experiments are stored on a branch of the project, there may be multiple experiment branches.

If the study is a private one, and thus results may be uploaded, each device will push it’s results to a unique branch of the project.

A study with no branches has got 2 groups associated with it. A study-committers group which the owner of the project has access to, and study-devices group, which is a supergroup containing all the experiment branch groups.

Each experiment branch has in turn 1 group associated with it, which provides read access to that specific branch. This experiment branch group is included in the study-devices group.

device

Devices can be registered through the apex-study web page and all information needed to create the Gerrit account is extracted from the public key generated by APEX.

The name is user_host on Windows/Linux, and serial_serial on Android. The email is user@host on Windows/Linux and serial@serial on Android. This email will also appear on results commits made if the device pushes results.

A device can have multiple ssh keys associated with it.

Because Gerrit can’t attach permissions to an account, each device has 1 group (1-device group). This group is added to an experiment branch group for read access.

If the study is private the 1-device-group is also given write access to a specific branch of a project, called results-user_host (Windows/Linux) or results-serial_serial (Android).

structure

The entire structure is hierarchical, read ↓ as owns/includes:

For results the structure is a lot simpler:

Implementation

A collection of scripts is present in apex/tools/study which interact with a gerrit instance and create projects, accounts, and groups; and edit project configurations.