Whalebuilder 🐋

Build .deb packages inside a container.

Why use a container to build packages?

• Because building occurs inside a container build dependencies and build cruft will not pollute your workstation.

• Building is done in a clean and reproducible environment. So that it is possible to verify that a package can be built by others using the same environment¹.

• Allows building for other/newer/older distributions on the same machine.

The idea behind whalebuilder is to serve as an alternative for pbuilder. But instead of using a chroot environment, it uses a container. Where pbuilder provides tools for creating and maintaining chroot environments here you would use any container creation/management software, such as podman or docker, and whalebuilder simply builds the package using those containers.

Basics

Essentially, whalebuilder does three things:

1. Launch a container and mount your current working directory.
2. Install build dependencies.
3. Run dpkg-buildpackage.

Therefore, it basically works like a replacement for dpkg-buildpackage in your local workflow. If you would normally run dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc, you could instead run:

/path/to/whalebuilder.sh -- -us -uc

Note that options after a double dash '--' are passed verbatim to dpkg-buildpackage.

By default whalebuilder will use the debian:sid-slim image. If you wish to build a package, for example, for Ubuntu 22.04. You could run:

/path/to/whalebuilder.sh --image ubuntu:22.04 -- -us -uc

Advanced Usage

Integration with git-buildpackage

Use the --git-builder option as follows when invoking gbp buildpackage:

gbp buildpackage --git-builder=/path/to/whalebuilder.sh

Note that gbp buildpackage is able to pass on options specifically for whalebuilder like:

gbp buildpackage --git-builder=/path/to/whalebuilder.sh --image ubuntu:22.04

Reusing a Container

To speed up the build process you can first run whalebuilder but only install build dependencies (using the --no-build option) and save the container at that stage (using the --save option).

/path/to/whalebuilder.sh --no-build --save <image-name>

Next calls to whalebuilder in the form below will find the build dependencies already installed and will only have to build the packages.

/path/to/whalebuilder.sh --image <image-name>

Custom Build Dependencies

Option --deps allows specifying a folder. Any .deb packages in that folder will be installed before performing the build.

By default, whalebuilder attempts to guess the dependencies required to build the package based what's stated at the debian/control file. For this it uses the mk-build-deps script from the devscripts package. This implies that packages devscripts and equivs are installed by default in the container. To disable this behavior use option --no-auto-deps.

/path/to/whalebuilder.sh --deps /path/to/deps --no-auto-deps

Other Features

For a for a full list of options:

/path/to/whalebuilder.sh --help

Requirements

• Bash
• Podman or Docker

Contributing & Road Map

Contributions, issues and feature requests are welcome.

Current feature wish list:

• Testing
• Support autopkgtest
• Support piuparts

License

Copyright © 2023 Rock Storm

WhaleBuilder is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later
version.

WhaleBuilder is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with
WhaleBuilder. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Credits

Heavily inspired on docker-deb-builder by Tero Saarni.