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Cloud(x); profile image Axel Navarro
Axel Navarro for Cloud(x);

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Testing our package build in the Docker world

#archlinux #bash #linux #docker

We write and build our PKGBUILD files in our local machine, but we need to make sure our build script is portable and up to date with the required dependencies.

If you've built a CI before, you already know that Docker is a de facto solution for this. You should create a container, install the dependencies to build Arch Linux package, and then build your PKGBUILD to check the success result.

Creating the container

First, we should install the docker package and start its service:

sudo pacman -S docker sudo systemctl start docker.service
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Then, start an interactive container using the Arch Linux image as base:

sudo docker run -it archlinux bash
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Preparing the container

We should add the base-devel package group to our container - these packages are required to build packages ourselves. The Arch Linux team is working in a new docker image archlinux:devel with this package group pre-installed.

And, Git if we want to test a PKGBUILD hosted in the AUR repository.

pacman -Sy --noconfirm base-devel git
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💡 Tip: Maybe you need to check the /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist file to get a good bandwidth based on your geolocation.

Add a non-root user

For security reasons, makepkg can't run as root, but we need to add a user with sudo to build the package.

useradd builduser -m # Create the builduser passwd -d builduser # Delete the buildusers password printf 'builduser ALL=(ALL) ALL\n' | tee -a /etc/sudoers # Allow the builduser passwordless sudo
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Now, change the user:

su builduser && cd
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Cloning the AUR package

We can clone the AUR package without using an AUR helper, like yay. We'll use the .Net Core app we visited in the previous post.

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/taskcore.git
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Build the package

And now we can build and install our package

makepkg -si --noconfirm
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Then, clean the orphan packages that we don't need on runtime:

pacman -Rns $(pacman -Qtdq)
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Automate the build process

We can create a Dockerfile to run the build steps without an interactive terminal.

FROM archlinux RUN pacman -Sy --noconfirm base-devel git ARG AUR_PACKAGE=taskcore RUN useradd builduser -m \  && passwd -d builduser \  && cd /home/builduser \  && git clone "https://aur.archlinux.org/$AUR_PACKAGE.git" target \  && chown builduser -R target \  && (printf 'builduser ALL=(ALL) ALL\n' | tee -a /etc/sudoers) \  && sudo -u builduser bash -c 'cd ~/target && makepkg -si --noconfirm' \  && pacman -Rns $(pacman -Qtdq) WORKDIR /home/builduser/target CMD ["bash"]
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We can build other packages using the --build-arg argument:

sudo docker build --build-arg AUR_PACKAGE=git-delta -t git-delta .
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Run the package!

Don't forget to run the package to check the runtime dependencies.

docker run -it taskcore taskcore ls
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New base-devel image! (Update 2020-11-06)

The ticket was closed and the new archlinux:base-devel image is available, with a current size of 700MB vs 467MB for archlinux:latest (a.k.a. archlinux:base).

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