Typical Use Cases¶

Typically a session will involve one or more pairs of jobs such as:

id: some-action
plugin: shell
summary: do something and save the log file to disk
commmand: do-something > $PLAINBOX_SESSION_SHARE/some-action.log
id: some-action-attachment
plugin: attachment
summary: log file of the do-something command
command: cat $PLAINBOX_SESSION_SHARE/some-action.log

The job some-action will use the do-something executable to perform some tests. The log file of that action will be saved on the device executing the test, in the directory exposed through the environment variable $PLAINBOX_SESSION_SHARE.

The some-action-attachment job will use that same directory and the agreed-upon name of the log file and cat (1) it, which coupled with the plugin type shell will cause Plainbox to attach the log file to the resulting document.

Checkbox Compatibility¶

Jobs designed to work with pre-Plainbox-based Checkbox may still refer to the old, somewhat confusing, environment variable $CHECKBOX_DATA. It points to the same directory.

Multi-Node Sessions¶

When a test session involves multiple devices this directory is separately instantiated for each device. Jobs executing on separate devices cannot use this facility to communicate. If communication is required jobs are expected to use the LAVA-inspired, MPI-based communication API. For details see plainbox-multi-node-api (7)