Relation to Taskcluster#
Taskcluster executes the actual tasks (JSON objects) and places them on a queue. A worker later claims that task, executes it, and updates the task with the results. Tasks can be created, re-run, retriggered or cancelled via the Taskcluster libraries, the firefox-ci or community UIs or Treeherder. In a code base, tasks can be created via a .taskcluster.yml file.
The Taskgraph library is separate from the Taskcluster platform, but works synergistically with it; it delegates to the decision task which manages task creation and dependencies. For example, it’ll determine that a signing task should wait until a build task has been completed before running or that android installation dependencies should always run before an android build starts. It can be used to fetch secrets for a testing platform as part of a ui-test task.
See also
Why Taskcluster#
There are tens of thousands of tasks that are needed to build, test and release Firefox and most off the shelf solutions aren’t designed with this kind of scale in mind. In addition to scaling efficiently, Taskcluster is able to handle complex task scheduling, support any external providers (e.g Bitrise) and provides sophisticated caching and optimization techniques. Security features like Chain of Trust and a fine-grained permissions system (called “scopes”) allows Mozilla to maintain full control of signing keys and certificates.