ostree/docs/buildsystem-and-repos.md

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Writing a buildsystem and managing repositories

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OSTree is not a package system. It does not directly support building source code. Rather, it is a tool for transporting and managing content, along with package-system independent aspects like bootloader management for updates.

We'll assume here that we're planning to generate commits on a build server, then have client systems replicate it. Doing client-side assembly is also possible of course, but this discussion will focus primarily on server-side concerns.

Build vs buy

Therefore, you need to either pick an existing tool for writing content into an OSTree repository, or write your own. An example tool is rpm-ostree - it takes as input RPMs, and commits them (currently oriented for server-side, but aiming to do client-side too).

Initializing

For this initial discussion, we're assuming you have a single archive repository:

mkdir repo
ostree --repo=repo init --mode=archive

You can export this via a static webserver, and configure clients to pull from it.

Writing your own OSTree buildsystem

There exist many, many systems that basically follow this pattern:

$pkg --installroot=/path/to/tmpdir install foo bar baz
$imagesystem commit --root=/path/to/tmpdir

For various values of $pkg such as yum, apt-get, etc., and values of $imagesystem could be simple tarballs, Amazon Machine Images, ISOs, etc.

Now obviously in this document, we're going to talk about the situation where $imagesystem is OSTree. The general idea with OSTree is that wherever you might store a series of tarballs for applications or OS images, OSTree is likely going to be better. For example, it supports GPG signatures, binary deltas, writing bootloader configuration, etc.

OSTree does not include a package/component build system simply because there already exist plenty of good ones - rather, it is intended to provide an infrastructure layer.

The above mentioned rpm-ostree compose tree chooses RPM as the value of $pkg - so binaries are built as RPMs, then committed as a whole into an OSTree commit.

But let's discuss building our own. If you're just experimenting, it's quite easy to start with the command line. We'll assume for this purpose that you have a build process that outputs a directory tree - we'll call this tool $pkginstallroot (which could be yum --installroot or debootstrap, etc.).

Your initial prototype is going to look like:

$pkginstallroot /path/to/tmpdir
ostree --repo=repo commit -s 'build' -b exampleos/x86_64/standard --tree=dir=/path/to/tmpdir

Alternatively, if your build system can generate a tarball, you can commit that tarball into OSTree. For example, OpenEmbedded can output a tarball, and one can commit it via:

ostree commit -s 'build' -b exampleos/x86_64/standard --tree=tar=myos.tar

Constructing trees from unions

The above is a very simplistic model, and you will quickly notice that it's slow. This is because OSTree has to re-checksum and recompress the content each time it's committed. (Most of the CPU time is spent in compression which gets thrown away if the content turns out to be already stored).

A more advanced approach is to store components in OSTree itself, then union them, and recommit them. At this point, we recommend taking a look at the OSTree API, and choose a programming language supported by GObject Introspection to write your buildsystem scripts. Python may be a good choice, or you could choose custom C code, etc.

For the purposes of this tutorial we will use shell script, but it's strongly recommended to choose a real programming language for your build system.

Let's say that your build system produces separate artifacts (whether those are RPMs, zip files, or whatever). These artifacts should be the result of make install DESTDIR= or similar. Basically equivalent to RPMs/debs.

Further, in order to make things fast, we will need a separate bare-user repository in order to perform checkouts quickly via hardlinks. We'll then export content into the archive repository for use by client systems.

mkdir build-repo
ostree --repo=build-repo init --mode=bare-user

You can begin committing those as individual branches:

ostree --repo=build-repo commit -b exampleos/x86_64/bash --tree=tar=bash-4.2-bin.tar.gz
ostree --repo=build-repo commit -b exampleos/x86_64/systemd --tree=tar=systemd-224-bin.tar.gz

Set things up so that whenever a package changes, you redo the commit with the new package version - conceptually, the branch tracks the individual package versions over time, and defaults to "latest". This isn't required - one could also include the version in the branch name, and have metadata outside to determine "latest" (or the desired version).

Now, to construct our final tree:

rm -rf exampleos-build
for package in bash systemd; do
  ostree --repo=build-repo checkout -U --union exampleos/x86_64/${package} exampleos-build
done
# Set up a "rofiles-fuse" mount point; this ensures that any processes
# we run for post-processing of the tree don't corrupt the hardlinks.
mkdir -p mnt
rofiles-fuse exampleos-build mnt
# Now run global "triggers", generate cache files:
ldconfig -r mnt
  (Insert other programs here)
fusermount -u mnt
ostree --repo=build-repo commit -b exampleos/x86_64/standard --link-checkout-speedup exampleos-build

There are a number of interesting things going on here. The major architectural change is that we're using --link-checkout-speedup. This is a way to tell OSTree that our checkout is made via hardlinks, and to scan the repository in order to build up a reverse (device, inode) -> checksum mapping.

In order for this mapping to be accurate, we needed the rofiles-fuse to ensure that any changed files had new inodes (and hence a new checksum).

Migrating content between repositories

Now that we have content in our build-repo repository (in bare-user mode), we need to move the exampleos/x86_64/standard branch content into the repository just named repo (in archive mode) for export, which will involve zlib compression of new objects. We likely want to generate static deltas after that as well.

Let's copy the content:

ostree --repo=repo pull-local build-repo exampleos/x86_64/standard

Clients can now incrementally download new objects - however, this would also be a good time to generate a delta from the previous commit.

ostree --repo=repo static-delta generate exampleos/x86_64/standard

More sophisticated repository management

Next, see Repository Management for the next steps in managing content in OSTree repositories.

Licensing for this document:

SPDX-License-Identifier: (CC-BY-SA-3.0 OR GFDL-1.3-or-later)