Getting started with debusine
In this tutorial you will discover two of debusine’s building blocks: work requests and artifacts. The former lets you schedule the execution of different kind of tasks on remote workers, while the latter is a simple way to represent a set of files managed by debusine.
For the purpose of this tutorial, we will use debusine’s command line interface to:
create a build environment
upload a source package
build binary packages out of the uploaded source package and in the build chroot that got created
Pre-requisites
You need to have access to a working debusine instance:
If you are a Debian developer, you can use debusine.debian.net. You can login there with your salsa.debian.org account, and it will automatically create your debusine account.
Otherwise, please follow the instructions from Install your first debusine instance. Once completed, the debusine instance will be available under the
debusine.internal
hostname and this is the name that we will continue to use here.
Install the client and configure it
You should first install the debusine-client
package (if needed
configure APT with one of the supported package repositories):
$ sudo apt install debusine-client
Now it’s time to create yourself a token
that the client will use to connect to the server. For this open your
web browser and visit the URL of your debusine instance
(e.g. http://debusine.internal
or
https://debusine.debian.net). Then login with your user credentials
(or with the salsa.debian.org authentication) and open the user menu
(in the top right corner, or behind the “hamburger” menu) and click on
the Tokens page.
Click the link create a new token and input a comment describing the token’s intended usage (for example “On my laptop”) and click the Create button. You will receive the token, which you should copy before exiting the page as the token will only be shown once.
Finally, we can create debusine-client’s configuration file. It indicates the server URL and the token to use (please adjust the DEBUSINE_URL to match your specific case and paste the value of the token in the TOKEN variable):
$ DEBUSINE_URL="http://debusine.internal" # or DEBUSINE_URL="https://debusine.debian.net"
$ TOKEN="1e81fb5f00a489344ddfe4e34588c84d202a97ca87cc136d15d17cb3d1eb4e82"
$ DEBUSINE_FQDN=$(basename $DEBUSINE_URL)
$ mkdir -p ~/.config/debusine/client
$ cat >~/.config/debusine/client/config.ini <<END
[General]
default-server = $DEBUSINE_FQDN
[server:$DEBUSINE_FQDN]
api-url = $DEBUSINE_URL/api
token = $TOKEN
END
More information about the debusine command line interface is available in The debusine command.
Create a build environment
If you’re using debusine.debian.net, you can skip this step, as suitable build environments have already been created for you.
Otherwise, start by creating a debian:environments collection on your server:
$ sudo -u debusine-server debusine-admin create_collection \
debian debian:environments </dev/null
You’ll also need to have the necessary permissions to create workflow templates. We don’t yet have a good interface for granting this permission, so for now you’ll need to insert this into the database by hand:
$ sudo -u debusine-server debusine-admin shell
from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model
from django.contrib.auth.models import Permission
User = get_user_model()
user = User.objects.get(username="YOUR-USER-NAME")
permission = Permission.objects.get_by_natural_key(
"add_workflowtemplate", "db", "workflowtemplate"
)
user.user_permissions.add(permission)
Then create an update_environments workflow template and start it running:
$ debusine create-workflow-template \
update-debian-environments update_environments <<END
vendor: "debian"
targets:
- codenames: ["trixie"]
architectures: ["amd64"]
backends: ["unshare"]
mmdebstrap_template:
bootstrap_options:
variant: "minbase"
bootstrap_repositories:
- mirror: "http://deb.debian.org/debian"
components: ["main"]
- codenames: ["trixie"]
architectures: ["amd64"]
variants: ["sbuild"]
backends: ["unshare"]
mmdebstrap_template:
bootstrap_options:
variant: "buildd"
bootstrap_repositories:
- mirror: "http://deb.debian.org/debian"
components: ["main"]
END
$ debusine create-workflow update-debian-environments <<END
{}
END
Once this workflow finishes (which will take a few minutes), you should have
a debian:environments
collection populated with some useful base
tarballs for trixie/amd64
that can be used with the unshare
backend:
a default variant containing only essential and required packages, and an
sbuild
variant that also contains build-essential packages. These can
be looked up by name. If you wish, you can vary the
targets
dictionary to build different environments, or automate this
workflow to run regularly.
Create an artifact by uploading a source package
The low level debusine create-artifact
command can be used to create
any arbitrary artifact but when it comes to Debian source packages (.dsc)
or Debian uploads (.changes), debusine offers a more convenient
interface with debusine import-debian-artifact [FILE|URL]
. You can
refer to a local file or to a remote URL.
For instance, you can create and upload an artifact for the “hello” source package with:
$ debusine import-debian-artifact http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/h/hello/hello_2.10-3.dsc
[...]
message: New artifact created in http://debusine.internal/api in workspace System with id 536.
artifact_id: 536
Artifacts can be provided as input to some debusine tasks. We will shortly use this artifact to schedule a package build.
Submit a work request to build binary packages
Submitting a work request is asking the debusine server to schedule some specific task on one of its available workers. Debusine can execute many different tasks.
Among the available tasks, the sbuild one can build
binary packages out of a source package (provided through the parameter
source_artifact
below the input
key) and a build chroot (provided
through the parameter environment
).
Each task requires a certain number of key-value parameters that are fed to
debusine create-work-request TASKNAME
as YAML data on the standard
input. Try this, taking care to refer to the ID of the artifact that we
created in the previous step (536
for the source package in this
example):
$ debusine create-work-request sbuild << END
build_components:
- any
- all
host_architecture: amd64
input:
source_artifact: 536
environment: debian/match:codename=trixie:variant=sbuild
END
This outputs some YAML structured information:
result: success
message: Work request registered on http://debusine.internal/api with id 315.
work_request_id: 315
At this point, the task has not been executed yet but it has been accepted
and will be processed as soon as a worker becomes available. You can
follow the status of the work request through the web interface
(click on Work requests in the top menu) or with debusine
show-work-request WORK_REQUEST_ID
.
$ debusine show-work-request 315
id: 315
created_at: 2024-01-24 17:02:31.855184+00:00
started_at: 2024-01-24 17:02:31.937001+00:00
completed_at: null
duration: null
status: running
result: ''
worker: 1
task_name: sbuild
task_data:
[…]
artifacts: []
workspace: System
In the above example, the task is currently running. Note that if the
status is pending
it indicates that no debusine-worker
is
currently available to run the task. Check that the debusine-worker
is
connected, has been approved and has mmdebstrap
installed.
Once it has completed (as indicated by status: completed
), you will
see different values: the result field will be either success
,
failure
(task ran but returned a failure) or error
(something
unexpected happened), and more information will be available in the
artifacts
key in particular:
$ debusine show-work-request 315
id: 315
created_at: 2024-01-24 17:02:31.855184+00:00
started_at: 2024-01-24 17:02:31.937001+00:00
completed_at: 2024-01-24 17:05:48.457239+00:00
duration: 196
status: completed
result: success
[…]
artifacts:
- id: 537
workspace: System
category: debian:package-build-log
[…]
- id: 538
workspace: System
category: debian:binary-package
[…]
- id: 541
workspace: System
category: debusine:work-request-debug-logs
[…]
The artifacts listed correspond to sets of files generated by the task, and
each task will typically generate the same kind of files as output. In the
case of the sbuild
task, you will get debian:upload, debian:binary-packages
and debian:package-build-log artifacts.
You will also get a debusine:work-request-debug-logs artifact containing various files
generated by debusine to help troubleshoot issues with the task.
The generated artifacts can be browsed and downloaded from the web interface. But they can also be downloaded from the command line with the debusine client:
$ debusine download-artifact 538
Downloading artifact and uncompressing into /home/debian
hello_2.10-3_amd64.deb
On top of the contained files, the artifact category also defines the
structure of the metadata that is associated to the artifact. You can
inspect those metadata and the file listing on the web interface or on
the command line with debusine show-artifact ARTIFACT_ID
(here 540
is the artifact ID of the debian:upload
artifact created by the
task):
$ debusine show-artifact 540
id: 540
workspace: System
category: debian:upload
created_at: '2024-01-24T17:05:04.975882+00:00'
data:
type: dpkg
changes_fields:
Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2022 16:30:00 +0100
[…]
download_tar_gz_url: http://debusine.internal/artifact/539/?archive=tar.gz
files_to_upload: []
expire_at: null
files:
hello_2.10-3_amd64.buildinfo:
size: 5511
checksums:
sha256: 422aef340c827d2ed2b38c353f660b70e754509bc0ddb0952975090d9f25caaa
type: file
url: http://debusine.internal/artifact/539/hello_2.10-3_amd64.buildinfo
hello_2.10-3_amd64.changes:
size: 1889
checksums:
sha256: d5d694b42b94587d38a5f883fe1fc5d44368ffe974ac3d506d55bcbef0ab0767
type: file
url: http://debusine.internal/artifact/539/hello_2.10-3_amd64.changes
hello_2.10-3_amd64.deb:
size: 53084
checksums:
sha256: 069754b87d7a546253554813252dacbd7a53e959845cc9f6e8f4c1c8fe3746c5
type: file
url: http://debusine.internal/artifact/539/hello_2.10-3_amd64.deb
hello-dbgsym_2.10-3_amd64.deb:
size: 35096
checksums:
sha256: 1550fcd93105a3cf8fddfc776fda0fbebb51dd7c2d2286eeabc43cb37896ad1e
type: file
url: http://debusine.internal/artifact/539/hello-dbgsym_2.10-3_amd64.deb