GSoC 2012: On-Demand Fedora Build Service: Update #5
The current github code [1] does quite a few things as of now. Let me try to explain to the changes since last update and my rationale behind them.
Support for building Live images: I attempted to use livemedia-creator (which is going to be THE tool from F18+), but unfortunately ran into issues which prevented me from building images. So for now, I have implemented this feature using ‘livecd-creator’. The Kickstart file (flattened) needs to be specified and other details such as architecture, any extra packages to be pulled from Koji, etc. The specifications are specified via the config/live.conf file.
The User specifications are now completely via .conf files: Myrationale behind that in the first place was that since this code is really going to serve as the ‘backend’, command line arguments could be done away with. But, even if we want to use this as standalone, specifying .conf files is fine as well. (We will see what happens with this after discussing with my mentors). Here is a brief description of the config files in config/
- imagebuild.conf: type of image, architecture, staging area (to be explained later) and email (for notification)
- boot.conf: configuration for boot.iso images
- repoinfo.conf: repository configuration required for the above
- pungi.conf: configuration for DVD images
- live.conf: configuration for live images
The kickstart files if needed are to be placed in the kickstarts/ sub-directory. To use it, you will need to ‘cd’ into ‘image_builder’ directory and run ‘$python run_imagebuild.py’ after setting up the appropriate config files in image_builder/config and kickstart files in kickstarts/
if any.
Support for copying images: I have also now enabled support for copying the images to a ‘staging area’ as mentioned earlier. I assume a passwordless login setup and hence do a ‘scp’ once the desired image has been created. This is how you would use it standalone.
Now, as a first step towards being able to distribute build jobs to different node, I have also now added simple support for carrying out the build process on a different host. This is done by the file
delegate.py.
Here is what it does:
- Assumes that the config/ and kickstart/ files have been correctly setup by the web-form handler or manually.
- Then copies these files to the image_builder/ directory
- It creates a .tar archive of the image_builder
- Then it reads the appropriate node (architecture) from the nodes.conf file and also retrieves the working location specified.
- The .tar file is then ‘scp’-ed to the appropriate location specified
- Then runs the run_imagebuild.py script on the build node by ‘SSHing’
- The image is then automatically transferred to the staging area
specified as earlier.
To try this feature, simply setup nodes.conf file correctly and the config/ and kickstarts/ in data/ and run $sudo python delegate.py
Note that the specified nodes should have all the dependencies installed, such as lorax, koji (setup correctly), pykickstart and livecd-creator.
Programming and writing about it. 