---
title: "Vieter 0.3.0"
date: 2022-06-13
---

When this post is live, Vieter 0.3.0 will have been released! This release
really does come with a lot of new features, including more reliable builds and
a new cron implementation!

This release ended up taking me over two months, but I'm quite proud of it :)
It not only adds a lot of useful features, but also paves the way for a lot
more cool features down the road!

## What is Vieter?

Vieter consists of two independents parts, namely an implementation of an Arch
(Pacman) repository, & a build system to populate said repository. The goal is
to remove the need for an AUR helper & move all builds to a remote server. Not
only does this greatly reduce update times on lower-end systems, it also
prevents AUR packages from being built multiple times on different systems.

The repository can also be used independently, providing a convenient server
for publishing Arch packages from CI builds for example.

While I specifically mention Arch & the AUR, Vieter is compatible with any
Pacman-based distro & can build PKGBUILDs provided from any Git source.

## What's changed?

### New cron daemon

Perhaps the most important feature in this release is the implementation of a
cron daemon. While 0.2.0 still relied on crond to periodically start builds,
0.3.0 can schedule builds completely independently.

The daemon understands a subset of the cron expression syntax. The build
schedule can be either configured globally or on a per-repo basis. This allows
the user to fine-tune certain packages, e.g. if they want them to be updated
more regularly than all the rest.

### More robust builds

Often, a build would fail with exit code 8. This error indicates that makepkg
wasn't able to install all dependencies, caused by the builder image not being
up to date enough. Due to this, each build now runs `pacman -Syu` before
running the actual build.

Builds can now also use dependencies that are part of the target repository.
This allows building packages with AUR dependencies, as long as all
dependencies are also being built for said repository.

### Build logs

The main server now stores the logs of each build, including the exit code.
This makes it a lot easier to debug why builds fail.

### Improved documentation

The [Vieter documentation](https://rustybever.be/docs/vieter/) has had a pretty
major re-write to get it up to date with this new release. Now there's also
[HTTP API docs](https://rustybever.be/docs/vieter/api/#introduction) & [man
pages](https://rustybever.be/man/vieter/vieter.1.html).

## Interested?

If you're interested in Vieter, considering joining
[#vieter:rustybever.be](https://matrix.to/#/#vieter:rustybever.be) on Matrix!
The source code can be found on my personal
[Gitea](https://git.rustybever.be/vieter/vieter).
