redbuild

magic containerized builds

overview

redbuild enables software to be built in pre-defined environments using the power of containerization. with podman installed, any supported project can be built with a single command. projects provide a build.docker and build.sh for defining the build environment and build steps.

redbuild: just add water!

install stable version from pypi

# with pipx (recommended)
pipx install redbuild
# with vanilla pip
pip install redbuild

build from source

To build redbuild2, we will use the redbuild1 shell script to bootstrap the build environment and build redbuild2.

./bootstrap/redbuild.sh

this will output ./redbuild.bin which you can symlink to one of your $PATH directories.

Here is a suggested setup:

mkdir -p ~/.bin
ln -s $(pwd)/redbuild.bin ~/.bin/redbuild

Now, you can run redbuild from anywhere!

try the example!

cd example
redbuild build

detailed usage

creating the build environment and build script

1. create a build.docker file in the project root. this file should contain a FROM directive for the base image to use for the build environment. the build environment should contain all the tools necessary to build the project. it's also very important that the last line of the dockerfile is CMD ["/bin/bash", "-l"]. this is necessary for redbuild to work.

   an example build.docker:

   FROM debian:bookworm-slim
   
   # install dependencies
   RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
       bash \
       curl wget xz-utils \
       gcc make libc6-dev libcurl4 \
       git libxml2 \
       && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* && apt autoremove -y && apt clean
   
   
   # install dlang
   RUN curl -fsS https://dlang.org/install.sh | bash -s install ldc-1.30.0 \
       && echo "source ~/dlang/ldc-1.30.0/activate" >> ~/.bashrc
   
   # set up main to run bash (necessary for redbuild)
   CMD ["/bin/bash", "-l"]

2. create a build.sh file in the project root. this file should contain the steps necessary to build the project. the build script should be written to be run in the build environment.

   build.sh:

   #!/bin/bash
   dub build --compiler ldc2 -B release

that's it! now you can build the project with redbuild build, copy it into the project root, and run it. you can also open an interactive shell in the build environment with redbuild shell.