Continuous Integration

OpenLane’s CI runs on GitHub Actions.

There are two primary flows: the pull request flow and the deployment flow.

The deployment flow occurs on a daily basis. The PR flow happens whenever someone creates a new Pull Request. PRs can be created by contributors or by an automated tool updater that runs on a schedule.

• A maintainer cannot review their own code, but they can merge it after a review by another maintainer.

Required Secrets/Variables

Repository secrets are used to protect certain credentials, while variables are repository-dependent parameters for the CI.

Common

Variable	Description
MAIN_BRANCH	The main branch for OpenLane. Format: main

Secret	Description
MY_TOKEN	A GitHub token for a bot account that: 1. owns the fork for the tool update. 2. has write access to the volare repo to push newly-built PDKs to.

CI

| Variable | Description | |—————| | VOLARE_OWNER/VOLARE_REPO | (optional) A volare repo to cache builds in. In our case, VOLARE_OWNER would be efabless and VOLARE_REPO would be volare. | | DOCKER_IMAGE | The name of the resulting Docker image (minus the tag). In our case, we use efabless/openlane. | | TOOL_DOCKER_IMAGE | The name of the resulting Docker images for tools (minus the tag). In our case, we use efabless/openlane-tools. |

Secret	Description
DOCKERHUB_USER	A username for a user that has push access to the organization that owns DOCKER_IMAGE on Docker Hub. In our case, that’s an Efabless Employee with push access.
DOCKERHUB_PASSWORD	The password/token for the given username that has push access to the organization that owns DOCKER_IMAGE on Docker Hub.

Tool Updater

Variable	Description
FORK_NAME	A fork to push branches for tool updates to. Format bot-account/OpenLane
BOT_AUTHOR_LINE	A git author line for the bot account, i.e. Firstname Lastname <email@example.com>.