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

Repository secrets are used to protect certain credentials, but also as repository-dependent parameters for the CI.

Common

Secret	Description
MAIN_BRANCH	The main branch for OpenLane. Format: main
MY_TOKEN	A 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

Secret	Description
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.
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.
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.

Tool Updater

Secret	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>.