LabControl is a system for controling elements of an automated testing lab. This is sometimes referred to a board farm.

LabControl consists of two main elements:

• the LabControl server, which stores items that represent the lab boards and resources
• the labcontrol client, which can add items to the server, and issue commands to resources in the lab

Introduction

LabControl server handles the user interface (HTML), as well as web-based object storage for the following lab objects

• Boards
• Resources
• User objects

Dependencies

• LabControl server CGI script (lcserver.cgi) requires Python 3 and the 'psutil' module

  • Under Debian or Ubuntu, do: "apt install python3-psutil"

• The Labcontrol client ('lc') requires Python 3 and the 'requests' module

  • Under Debian or Ubuntu, do: "apt install python3-requests"

• The labcontrol test server (a small, non-production-grade python http server), requires Python 2, and the CGIHTTPServer module

  • This should be included in the standard modules in your python2 installation.

Configuration

Before starting lcserver either create base directory in its default path (/usr/local/src/labcontrol/lc-data) or set base_dir variable in the lcserver.conf. Remeber to copy the configuration file to /etc/lcserver.conf.

Starting in foreground mode

To start lcserver in foreground mode, cd to the top-level directory, and run the script: start_server.

You may specify a TCP/IP port address for the server to use, on the command line, like so:

 $ start_server 8001

By default, port 8000 is used.

In foreground mode, the program runs directly in the terminal where the server was started, and log messages are displayed on the screen as the server processes network requests.

To stop the server, use CTRL-C (possibly a few times), to interrupt the running server.

To start lcserver in background mode, use the script: start_local_bg_server. You may specify the TCP/IP port address fro the server to use, on the command line, like so:

 $ start_local_bg_server [<port>]

In this case, the log data from the server will be placed in the file: /tmp/test-server-log.output

To stop the server, use the following command:

  $ kill $(pgrep -f test-server)

Accessing the server

To access the server using a web browser, go to: http://{ip address}:{port}/lcserver.py

To access the server using the command line, use the 'lc' command:

• lc help - to get command line help
• lc help {command} - to get help for an 'lc' command
• lc list-boards - to list the boards managed by the server
• lc list-resources - to list resources managed by the server
• lc {board} power reboot
• lc {board} power on
• lc {board} power off
• lc {board} power status

FIXTHIS - need to make these match the options used by 'ebf'

Configuring 'lc' to access the server

To access the server using the lc command, you need to configure it with the address of the server.

If you are using the simple test http server included with labcontrol, put the following lines in the /etc/lc.conf

server=http://localhost:8000/lcserver.py

If using a labcontrol service running under a "real" web server, use a configuration like the following:

• server=https://mydomain.org/cgi-bin/lcserver.py

depending on the URI path to the lcserver.py CGI script as it is installed in the remote web server.