rpm-ostree/docs/HACKING.md

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Hacking on rpm-ostree

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Building and testing in a container

The majority of developers on rpm-ostree build and test it from a toolbox container, separate from the host system. The instructions below may also work when run in a traditional login on a virtual machine, but are less frequently tested.

Installing dependencies (cxx)

Today rpm-ostree uses cxx.rs - the CLI tools for that aren't packaged in e.g. Fedora; we ship the pre-generated source in the releases. But to build from git you need to install the tools.

$ ./ci/installdeps.sh

You will also need to rerun this after the dependency changes in our Cargo.lock. Eventually we will fix this.

Installing dependencies: packages

Otherwise, you can use e.g. sudo dnf builddep rpm-ostree to get the rest of the build dependencies.

Baseline build

rpm-ostree uses autotools to build both our C/C++ side as well as to invoke cargo to build the Rust code. After you've cloned the repository:

$ git submodule update --init
$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64 --sysconfdir=/etc
$ make

Unit tests

$ make check

Virtualized integration testing

The unit tests today don't cover much; rpm-ostree is very oriented to run as a privileged systemd unit managing a host system.

rpm-ostree has some tests that use the coreos-assembler/kola framework.

You will want to build a custom image, then run make install in the ${topsrcdir}/tests/kolainst/ directory, and finally kola run --qemu-image path/to/custom-rpm-ostree-qemu.qcow2 'ext.rpm-ostree.*'. See the kola external tests documentation for more information and also how to filter tests.

There's also a vmcheck test suite. This model always operates on an immutable base image. It takes that image and dynamically launches a separate VM for each test using kola spawn. For example, using the CoreOS Assembler, you can build a FCOS image that contains the version of rpm-ostree that you would like to test.

One approach for (somewhat) fast iteration is cosa build-fast, then run e.g. ./tests/vmcheck.sh.

To filter tests, use the TESTS= environment variable. For example, to run only tests/vmcheck/test-misc-2.sh, you can do:

TESTS='misc-2' ./tests/vmcheck.sh

For development, there is also a make vmsync which copies the built rpm-ostree into an unlocked VM. To use this, you must have an ssh-config file with a host defined in it called vmcheck. You can provision the VM however you want; libvirt directly, vagrant, a remote OpenStack/EC2 instance, etc. If you choose vagrant for example, do something like this:

vagrant ssh-config > /path/to/src/rpm-ostree/ssh-config

Note that by default, these commands will retrieve the latest version of ostree from the build environment and include those binaries when syncing to the VM. So make sure to have the latest ostree installed or built. This allows you to not have to worry about using libostree APIs that are not yet released.

For more details on how tests are structured, see tests/README.md.

Testing with a custom libdnf

rpm-ostree bundles libdnf since commit 125c482b1d the rationale is:

• libdnf broke ABI several times silently in the past
• Today, dnf does not actually use libdnf much, which means for the most part any libdnf breakage is first taken by us
• libdnf is trying to rewrite more in C++, which is unlikely to help API/ABI stability
• dnf and rpm-ostree release on separate cycles (e.g. today rpm-ostree is used by OpenShift)

In general, until libdnf is defined 100% API/ABI stable, we will continue to bundle it.

However, because it's a git submodule, it's easy to test updates to it, and it also means we're not forking it.

So just do e.g.:

cd libdnf
git fetch origin
git reset --hard origin/main
cd ..

The various make targets will pick up the changes and recompile.

Testing with a custom ostree

It is sometimes necessary to develop against a version of ostree which is not even yet in git main. In such situations, one can simply do:

$ # from the rpm-ostree build dir
$ INSTTREE=$PWD/insttree
$ rm -rf $INSTTREE
$ # from the ostree build dir
$ make
$ make install DESTDIR=$INSTTREE
$ # from the rpm-ostree build dir
$ make
$ make install DESTDIR=$INSTTREE

At this point, simply set SKIP_INSTALL=1 when running vmsync and vmoverlay to reuse the installation tree and sync the installed binaries there:

$ make vmsync SKIP_INSTALL=1
$ make vmoverlay SKIP_INSTALL=1

Of course, you can use this pattern for not just ostree but whatever else you'd like to install into the VM (e.g. bubblewrap, libsolv, etc...).