LUCI_CONTEXT

LUCI_CONTEXT is a generic way for LUCI services to pass contextual information to each other. It has a very simple protocol:

• Application writes a JSON file out (usually a temp file)
• Application sets LUCI_CONTEXT environment variable to point to that file.
• Subprocesses are expected to read contents from LUCI_CONTEXT in whole or part.
• If any subprocess needs to add/modify information in the context, it copies the existing LUCI_CONTEXT entirely, then makes its modifications on the copy before writing it out to a different file (and updating the envvar appropriately.)

The LUCI_CONTEXT JSON file is always a JSON object (e.g. {...}), and applications are cooperative in terms of the top-level keys (all known keys for LUCI_CONTEXT and their meaning should be documented in this file). Every top-level key also corresponds to a JSON object (never a primitive), to avoid the temptation to pollute the top-level namespace with multiple related-but-not-grouped data items.

No implementation should make the assumption that it knows the full set of keys and/or schemas (hence the ‘copy-and-modify’ portion of the protocol).

Parents should keep any LUCI_CONTEXT files they write out alive for the subprocess to read them (>= observable lifetime of the subprocess). If a subprocess intends to outlive its parent, it MUST make its own copy of the LUCI_CONTEXT file.

Example contents:

{
  "local_auth": {
    "rpc_port": 10000,
    "secret": "aGVsbG8gd29ybGQK",
    ...
  },
  "swarming": {
    "secret_bytes": "cmFkaWNhbGx5IGNvb2wgc2VjcmV0IHN0dWZmCg=="
  }
}

Library support

There is an easy-to-use library for accessing the contents of LUCI_CONTEXT, as well as producing new contexts, located [here][./libs/luci_context/luci_context.py].

Known keys

For precision, the known keys should be documented with a block of protobuf which, when encoded in jsonpb, result in the expected values. Implementations will typically treat LUCI_CONTEXT as pure JSON, but we'd like to make the implementation more rigorous in the future (hence the strict schema descriptions). Currently implementing LUCI_CONTEXT in terms of actual protobufs would be onerous, given the way that this repo is deployed and used.

It's assumed that all of the field names in the proto snippets below EXACTLY correspond to their encoded JSON forms. When encoding in golang, this would be equivalent to specifying the ‘OrigName’ parameter in the Marshaller.

local_auth

Local auth specifies where subprocesses can obtain OAuth2 tokens to use when calling other services. It is a reference to a local RPC port, along with some configuration of what this RPC service (called “local auth service”) can provide.

message LocalAuth {
  message Account {
    string id = 1;
    string email = 2;
  }

  int rpc_port = 1;
  bytes secret = 2;

  repeated Account accounts = 3;
  string default_account_id = 4;
}

...

The returned tokens MUST have expiration duration longer than 150 sec. Clients of the protocol rely on this.

...

The email may be a special string "-" which means tokens produced by the auth server are not associated with any particular known email. This may happen when using tokens that don't have userinfo.email OAuth scope.

...

TODO(vadimsh): Finish this.

swarming

This section describes data passed down from the swarming service to scripts running within swarming.

message Swarming {
  // The user-supplied secret bytes specified for the task, if any. This can be
  // used to pass application or task-specific secret keys, JSON, etc. from the
  // task triggerer directly to the task. The bytes will not appear on any
  // swarming UI, or be visible to any users of the swarming service.
  byte secret_bytes = 1;
}