ATLAS Computing
NICOS manager for nightly builds
US ATLAS Computing

This document describes the main features of the NICOS (NIghtly COntrol System) tool that facilitates nightly builds of large software projects on UNIX-like platforms. It is currently used for


Please refer to this page for short instructions how to download, configure, and use the NICOS tool. Other related documents:


The NICOS tool is a set of PERL and Bourne Shell scripts. The NICOS tool controls the nightly builds of software products with large number of packages managed by different developers. It monitors build processes on multiple platforms trying to identify and compensate short term system problems, analyzes the build results, allows to run tests, and sends notifications about problems to responsible developers. The NICOS tool uses the CVS repository to get the code and imposes virtually no requirements on the release build system (can be configured to work with SRT, CMT, or SCRAM). The NICOS code consists of PERL and Bourne Shell scripts.

The NICOS tool is able to perform build processes on different platforms or with different compiling options in certain order. The information about the build progress is reflected on the nightly builds web page. There could be one nightly release for daily rebuilds, or several nightly releases with lifetimes. For instance, in the ATLAS project there are seven nightly releases with a lifetime of one week. The ATLAS nightlies include linked builds that produce binaries on different Linux platforms and with different compiling options, debug and optimized. The linked builds have the separate web pages of build results with links pointing to each other.

The NICOS implies the following stages of the build process:




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