rpm-ostree/docs/manual/compose-server.md
Colin Walters 70462a9a05 compose: Add a "warn and sleep" if --unified-core is not provided
Start adding some pain if `--unified-core` isn't provided
to help flush out anyone relying on it.  (And I think today
pungi is not passing it, so e.g. Fedora IoT/Silverblue are impacted)

Prep for merging https://github.com/coreos/rpm-ostree/pull/1793

Co-authored-by: Jonathan Lebon <jonathan@jlebon.com>
2020-05-20 17:17:28 +02:00

3.9 KiB

Using higher level build tooling

Originally rpm-ostree compose tree was intended to be a "high level" tool, but that didn't work out very well in practice. Today, you should consider it as a low level tool. For example, most people that want to generate OSTree commits also want to generate bootable disk images, and rpm-ostree has nothing to do with that.

One example higher level tool that takes care of both OSTree commit generation and bootable disk images is coreos-assembler.

Background on managing an OSTree repository

Before you get started, it's recommended to read (at least) these two sections of the OSTree manual:

Generating OSTree commits from a CentOS base

First, you'll need a copy of rpm-ostree. The current recommendation is to use a privileged container, but you can also install rpm-ostree directly to a physical or virtual machine.

It's included in the package collection for Fedora, and there are CentOS Core packages as well as bleeding edge CentOS builds.

You can create a privileged container with e.g. podman via: podman run --privileged registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora:27 .... However you create the environment, run yum -y install rpm-ostree.

A good first thing to try would be using the CentOS Atomic Host metadata to generate a custom host.

One time setup, where we clone the git repository, then make two OSTree repos, one for doing builds, one for export via HTTP:

# mkdir /srv/centos-atomic
# cd /srv/centos-atomic
# git clone https://github.com/CentOS/sig-atomic-buildscripts -b downstream
# mkdir build-repo
# ostree --repo=build-repo init --mode=bare-user
# mkdir repo
# ostree --repo=repo init --mode=archive

We'll also want to cache downloaded RPMs:

# mkdir cache

Running rpm-ostree compose tree

This program takes as input a manifest file that describes the target system, and commits the result to an OSTree repository.

The input format is a JSON "treefile". See examples in api-doc/treefile-examples. More real-world examples include the manifest for Fedora Atomic and CentOS Atomic.

If you're doing this multiple times, it's strongly recommended to create a cache directory:

# rpm-ostree compose tree --unified-core --cachedir=cache --repo=/srv/centos-atomic/build-repo sig-atomic-buildscripts/centos-atomic-host.json

This will download RPMs from the referenced repos, and commit the result to the OSTree repository, using the ref named by ref.

Once we have that commit, let's export it:

# ostree --repo=repo pull-local build-repo centos-atomic-host/7/x86_64/standard

You can tell client systems to rebase to it by combining ostree remote add, and rpm-ostree rebase on the client side.

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