So, what is Socorro?

  1. a planet in the Star Wars universe
  2. a city in Brazil
  3. an island in Mexico
  4. a server to process breakpad crash reports

All of those are true, but as you guessed (I hope! ) we will only consider the last option. So basically, Socorro is a software that collects, processes and stores crash reports generated by breakpad. We use breakpad in our desktop software such as Firefox, Firefox for Android, Thunderbird and FirefoxOS. We then have a Web interface that shows information about the stability our those software, and we call it crash-stats. As usual with Mozilla, most of the information on this site is public, the only exceptions being sensitive data like email addresses, URLs, etc.

Most of Socorro's code base in written in Python. The back-end is raw Python based on a tool called configman, developed by my colleagues Lars and Peter, that handles the configuration and is used as a dependency injection system. It allows Socorro to be very modular, and to add or remove components easily without changing any code. We use 3 different databases:

  1. HBase is the primary storage and is there for data consistency (it contains all the data we receive and process and must never lose data)
  2. PostgreSQL is used as the main source of data for the UI (it contains all the processed data and has a lot of materialized views with various computed information)
  3. elasticsearch is used as the secondary source of data for the UI, mainly for everything related to search. This is what I have been mainly working on.

The Web app is based on Playdoh, Mozilla's customized django framework. We have more and more javascript, mostly using jQuery, but it's a bit chaotic at the moment.

Interested in contributing?

If Socorro sounds like a good project to you and you would like to participate, we would be very happy to hear about you! There are a few places where you can start:

You can also join us in Mozilla's IRC server, channel #breakpad. There are a good variety of bugs to fix on Socorro, from pure front-end work to complex back-end Python problems. And if Socorro is not your thing but you still want to help Mozilla fulfill its mission, you can take a look at whatcanidoformozilla.org!