vieter/docs/content/building-packages.md

Building Packages

Vieter supports a basic build system that allows you to build the packages defined using the Git repositories API by running vieter build. For configuration, see here.

How it works

The build system works in two stages. First it pulls down the archlinux:latest image from Docker Hub, runs pacman -Syu & configures a non-root build user. It then creates a new Docker image from this container. This is to prevent each build having to fully update the container's repositories. After the image has been created, each repository returned by /api/repos is built sequentially by starting up a new container with the previously created image as a base. Each container goes through the following steps:

1. The repository is cloned
2. makepkg --nobuild --nodeps is ran to update the pkgver variable inside the PKGBUILD file
3. A HEAD request is sent to the Vieter server to check whether the specific version of the package is already present. If it is, the container exits.
4. makepkg is ran with MAKEFLAGS="-j\$(nproc)
5. Each produced package archive is uploaded to the Vieter instance's repository, as defined in the API for that specific Git repo.

Cron image

The Vieter Docker image contains crond & a cron config that runs vieter build every night at 3AM. This value is currently hardcoded, but I wish to change that down the line (work is in progress). There's also some other caveats you should be aware of, namely that the image should be run as root & that the healthcheck will always fail, so you might have to disable it. This boils down to the following docker-compose file:

version: '3'

services:
  cron:
    image: 'chewingbever/vieter:dev'
    command: crond -f
    user: root

    healthcheck:
      disable: true
        
    environment:
      - 'VIETER_API_KEY=some-key'
      - 'VIETER_ADDRESS=https://example.com'
    volumes:
      - '/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock'

Important to note is that the container also requires the host's Docker socket to be mounted as this is how it spawns the necessary containers, as well as a change to the container's command.