rpm-ostree

This tool takes a set of packages, and commits them to an OSTree repository. At the moment, it is intended for use on build servers.

Major changes since 2014.8

The previous major release of this program contained within it an "autobuilder" codebase which had significant functionality beyond just composing trees, such as creating VM disk images and running smoketests.

Since that time, the other functionality has moved to: https://github.com/cgwalters/rpm-ostree-toolbox

This program now only commits trees to a repository, using "treefiles" which are very simple JSON input data.

Installing and setting up a repository

First, unfortunately you must disable SELinux on the build host in order to support SELinux on the built system. See: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1060423

Second, you must install nss-altfiles on the host system, and edit your /etc/nsswitch.conf to include altfiles, like this:

passwd: files altfiles 
group:  files altfiles

You may or may not be using SSSD (and thus the sss option); if you are then it should look like:

passwd: files altfiles sss
group:  files altfiles sss

For more information, see: http://lists.rpm.org/pipermail/rpm-maint/2014-January/003652.html

There are packages available in the rpm-ostree COPR: http://copr-fe.cloud.fedoraproject.org/coprs/walters/rpm-ostree/

At the moment, all of the tooling except for the patched shadow-utils is in Fedora rawhide.

Once you have that done, choose a build directory. Here we'll use /srv/rpm-ostree.

# cd /srv/rpm-ostree
# mkdir repo
# ostree --repo=repo init --mode=archive-z2

Running rpm-ostree

The core "rpm-ostree tree compose" builtin as input a "treefile". See examples in doc/treefile-examples, as well as doc/treefile.md.

# rpm-ostree compose tree --repo=/srv/rpm-ostree/repo --proxy=http://127.0.0.1:8123 sometreefile.json

All this does is use yum to download RPMs from the referenced repos, and commit the result to the OSTree repository, using the ref named by ref. Note that we've specified a local caching proxy (polipo in this case) - otherwise we you will download the packages for each treecompose.

You can export /srv/rpm-ostree/repo via any static webserver.

The use of --proxy is not mandatory but strongly recommended - with this option you can avoid continually redownloading the packages every compose. I personally use Polipo, but you can of course any HTTP proxy you wish.