Greenhouse automation stuff

• Installing and configuring the automation
• Adding your credentials to the automation
• Duplicating job posts to different locations
• Cloning from separate parent posts
• Deleting posts before duplicating
• Supported Browsers
• Available Regions
• Additional Troubleshooting

Installing and configuring the automation

---

git clone https://github.com/desrod/greenhouse
cd greenhouse
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

If you are using Chrome you'll need to install the appropriate version of ChromeDriver for your browser, see https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads

Make sure you choose the version that is in the same major version as your installed version of Chrome.

$ google-chrome --version
Google Chrome 95.0.4638.17

You can download the matching version, and unpack it into somewhere in your $PATH, or place it in a location you can append to $PATH later. I've put it into /opt/bin here:

$ /opt/bin/chromedriver --version
ChromeDriver 95.0.4638.17 (a9d0719444d4b035e284ed1fce73bf6ccd789df2-refs/branch-heads/4638@{#178})

You will also need to put this in your default $PATH, or export a new $PATH environment variable to include this location, eg:

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/bin

Adding your credentials to the automation

---

The oroginal automation this repo was forked from used environment variables to hodl the SSO_EMAIL and SSO_PASSWORD. This forked version puts these in a managed file in ~/.local/share/greenhouse/ called login.tokens, with the following format:

{
    "username": "your.name@canonical.com",
    "password": "So0perSe3kre7P4ssw0rd"
}

Keep in mind that any 'foreign' characters you may have in your password may need to be escaped in this file, so it will be parsed correctly. For example, if you have a forward-slash '/' in your password, you'd need to escape that as follows:

    "password": "So0per\\/Se3kre7\\/P4ssw0rd"

The same rule applies for backslashes:

    "password": "So0per\\\\Se3kre7\\\\P4ssw0rd"

Protect this file with your standard operating system permissions. chmod 0400 should be sufficient to secure it against any unintentional snooping.

Duplicating job posts to different locations

---

Start with a Greenhouse job with one job posting (the one that will be duplicated).

Get the numeric id for the job. You can get this by going to the job dashboard and copying the id out of the url. It will look something like this:

https://canonical.greenhouse.io/sdash/1592880

That number at the end of the url is the job id.

Now run the script and tell it which job id(s) you want to update with new job posts, and which regions you want to post in:

./post-job.py 1592880 1726996 --region americas emea

Note: If you're cloning to multiple regions, you must provide them at the time of cloning. You cannot clone to 'emea' and then in a second pass, clone to 'americas', as this will fail.

The browser will open and things will happen:

• Script will log you in to Ubuntu SSO and then pause for you to 2FA.

• New posts will be created for each city in the region that doesn't already have an existing post in that location.

• The new posts (and any others that are currently 'OFF') will be turned ON (made live on the 'Canonical - Jobs' board).

  Note: Please make sure you review the posts when complete, so any that you intended to remain off, are disabled after cloning.

If the script fails partway through you can safely rerun it, since it won't create a duplicate job post for cities that already have one.

Note: If the script does fail, it may leave lingering 'chromedriver' processes running. You can kill those off easily with the following:

kill -9 $(pgrep -f chromedriver)

Cloning from separate parent posts

---

In some cases, you may have a single job that is posted uniquely to specific regions. For example, a DSE role that gets posted to nycmetro and brasil (both in AMER region), but each post may have their own unique requirements or job description.

To facilitate this, the automation has a --limit flag, which allows you to restrict which post you're targeting when cloning (a "parent" post, in this vernacular).

To clone a specific post, you'll need to identify two key numeric values:

1. The job_id, found in the URL field of your browser when editing/viewing the role in GH. The job_id in the URL if your browser, will look like:

   /plans/123456/jobapp
   

2. The app_id, which you can find by clicking the edit pencil next to the specific parent post you want to clone from. In your browser's URL field, you'll now see a different number that will look like:

   /jobapps/543210/edit
   

   This second number is the app_id.

3. Knowing these two values, you can then clone with the --limit flag using this syntax:

   ./post-job.py 123456 --region emea --limit 543210 --headless
   

I have a Tampermonkey browser add-on that exposes this on each job post to make it easier to clone these roles. Please contact me directly if you want the link to that add-on and wish to use it (link intentionally not posted in this README).

Deleting posts before duplicating

---

Before you clone your posts, you may want to make some changes to the job description, application questions, job naming or other job-specific changes. You'll make those changes in the "parent" post (the source of your clones).

But you may already have dozens of posts that you duplicated previously. Those will need to be removed and recreated with your latest changes/updates. We also re-clone the job posts on a regular basis to "top-post" them at the various job boards, so they get more attention after they've aged off and gone "below the margin" on those boards.

To delete and reset your job posts, a preparatory step before re-duplicating (cloning) posts, you can use the following syntax, making sure to use the job_id, not the app_id here. Using the example from the previous section, that would be:

 ./post-job.py --reset-all 123456 --headless

This will then go through job_id: 123456, remove all posts that are not "parent posts", leaving you with post 543210 (in keeping with the previous example, our parent to be cloned from).

Once your posts have been removed, you can then duplicate them using the steps in the previous secton.

At the moment, this is a two-step process, while we work out how to limit (using the --limit flag described earlier), to filter those posts.

1. Remove duplicated posts, leaving only the parent post(s) (using --reset-all)
2. Re-duplicate your job posts based on those parent post(s) (using --limit where needed)

Supported Browsers

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Default browser is Chrome but you can alternatively pass the --browser firefox option.

This was only tested on Chrome, but may also work with Firefox. YMMV, but report issues you find and we'll fix it!

Available Regions

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The available regions are americas, emea and apac. Please DO NOT update the list of cities in those regions directly in the source file without explicit discussion and approval.

Additional Troubleshooting

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If you see an error that looks like:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "env/lib/python3.8/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/common/service.py", line 72, in start
    self.process = subprocess.Popen(cmd, env=self.env,
  File "/usr/lib/python3.8/subprocess.py", line 858, in __init__
    self._execute_child(args, executable, preexec_fn, close_fds,
  File "/usr/lib/python3.8/subprocess.py", line 1704, in _execute_child
    raise child_exception_type(errno_num, err_msg, err_filename)
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'chromedriver'

This means you haven't yet given the path to chromedriver on your system. If you put this in a location already in $PATH, it should work, but some like to put these in directories not in the path (such as /opt/bin/), and that would need to be exported, as follows:

 export PATH=$PATH:/opt/bin

Then re-running the same post-jobs.py command will work as expected.