Blacksmith

Blacksmith is a command line tool based on NodeJS designed to build third-party software and its dependencies on a Unix platform.

• Compile a list of software components in a specific order.
• Generate a Docker Image to compile components in an isolated environment.
• Customize the compilation logic to modify the default behavior. E.g. customize the arguments to pass to the configure command.

NOTE: Please note this library is currently under active development. Any major release is subject to backwards incompatible changes.

Installation

Blacksmith is supported in any 64-bit Linux distribution. OS X and Windows platforms are not supported right now. We are open to PRs to support other platforms.

Development version

Blacksmith requires Node.js and npm already installed on the system. Clone the repo and install dependencies and runtime.

$ git clone https://github.com/bitnami/blacksmith
$ cd blacksmith
$ npm install
$ npm run install-runtime
$ bin/blacksmith --help

Get started

Blacksmith provides different ways of operation through its multiple CLI commands, all of them following the format:

$ blacksmith [<global-options> | <command> [<command-options> [<command-arguments>]]]

• <global-options>: Global Blacksmith options that are not specific to any particular sub-command.
• <command>: Command to execute: configure, build, containerized-build, shell
• <command-options>: Options related to the command being executed.
• <command-arguments>: Command-specific arguments.

To get more information about a command, you can execute: blacksmith <command> --help

How to compile third party software

This example demonstrates how to compile the 'zlib' library with Blacksmith. We would need:

• The source code of zlib. It can be found at the zlib official page's download section
• A JSON file that should contain:
  • [Optional] The platform you want to build the components for.
  • The list of components that you want to build. Each component should define:
    • Component ID and version
    • [Optional] Additional metadata of the component
    • The path to the tarball with the source code
    • The path to a JavaScript file defining the compilation instructions for zlib

/tmp/zlib.json

{
  "components": [
    {
      "id": "zlib",
      "version": "1.2.11",
      "metadata": {
        "licenses": [
          {
            "type": "ZLIB",
            "licenseRelativePath": "README",
            "main": true
          }
        ]        
      },
      "recipeLogicPath": "/tmp/zlib.js",
      "source": {
        "tarball": "/tmp/zlib-1.2.11.tar.gz",
        "sha256": "c3e5e9fdd5004dcb542feda5ee4f0ff0744628baf8ed2dd5d66f8ca1197cb1a1"
      }
    }  
  ]
}

/tmp/zlib.js

'use strict';

class Zlib extends Library {
  configureOptions() {
    return ['--shared'];
  }
}

module.exports = Zlib;

Configuring Blacksmith

If this is the first time you run Blacksmith you will need to configure it with at least a base image. This image will be used by Blacksmith as the environment for its builds. For doing so you can run:

>$ blacksmith configure --action add baseImages '{
  "id": "bitnami/minideb-extras:jessie-buildpack",
  "platform": {"os": "linux", "arch": "x64", "distro": "debian", "version": "8"},
  "buildTools":[
    {"id": "build-essential", "type": "system"},
    {"id": "git", "type": "system"},
    {"id": "pkg-config", "type": "system"},
    {"id": "unzip", "type": "system"}
  ]
}'

Executing the previous command will configure Blacksmith to use the image bitnami/minideb-extras:jessie-buildpack by default. This is a base image based on Debian that has already installed build-essential, git, pkg-config and unzip. We should specify those properties in order to Blacksmith to handle build and component requirements.

Compilation action

Once you have Blacksmith configured you can call the actual compilation command:

$> blacksmith containerized-build /tmp/zlib.json
blacksm INFO  Preparing build environment
[...]
blacksm INFO  Running build inside docker image binami/minideb:jessie-extras
[...]
blacksm INFO  Command successfully executed. Find its results under {{blacksmith-output}}
blacksm INFO  logs: {{blacksmith-output}}/logs
blacksm INFO  artifacts: {{blacksmith-output}}/artifacts
blacksm INFO  config: {{blacksmith-output}}/config

Find more information about Blacksmith features in the Blacksmith user guide.

Licensing

Blacksmith is licensed under the GPL, Version 2.0

See the COPYING file for the full license text.

Contributing

Before submitting a pull request, please make sure the following is done:

• Fork the repo and create your branch from master.
• If you've added code that should be tested, please add a test
• Ensure the test suite passes (npm test).
• Make sure your code lints (eslint)
• In order to accept your pull request, we need you to submit this CLA