aidan-gallagher / debpic

Debpic lets you easily build Debian packages in an isolated Docker environment.

DEBPIC: DEbian Build Package In Container

Introduction

Debpic lets you build Debian packages in an isolated Docker environment.

See the man page for an introduction and usage instructions.

The Debian wiki has a list of similar tools.

Overview

Tasks	Steps
Build	debpic
Interactive mode	debpic --interactive
Open VSCode in container	debpic --vscode
Local Apt Repository	debpic --local-repository ~/mydebs
Private Apt Repository (Configure)	Write deb822 format sources to /etc/debpic/sources.list.d/MyServer
Private Apt Repository (Use)	debpic --sources MyServer
Use DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS	DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="nocheck no_lto" debpic
Run Command in container	debpic "my command"
Install extra packages	debpic --extra-pkg gdb
Set destination directory	debpic --destination ~/my_built_packages
Pass args to dpkg-buildpackage	debpic -- -b
Hook script (Configure)	Write script to /etc/debpic/hooks/myscript
Hook script (Use)	debpic --hook myscript
Use golang tooling	debpic --hook gopath --interactive
Jenkins Integration	See Using With Jenkins.

User Experience	Info
Tab completion	Yes
Man page	Yes
Coloured Output	Yes
Caching	Container is cached. Ccache enabled by default.
Config file	~/.config/debpic/debpic.conf
Built package location	./built_packages/
Include extra tools	Edit ./developer-packages.txt

Installation

1. Download debpic debian package

2. Install debpic

sudo apt install ~/Downloads/debpic_1.0.0_all.deb

3. Configure docker to run as non-root user. See official docker documentation for more details.

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker

4. . Optionally - configure git to globally ignore generated built_packages directory

echo built_packages >> ~/.config/git/ignore

debpic's Issues

Improve support for --vscode

Experimental support for vscode was implemented.

It needs cleaned up and tested further.

• Need to handle existing .devcontainer file.

Should consider devcontainer file to specify image name rather than dockerfile

• This means vscode doesn't have to build from scratch despite debpic already having built it.
• This gets around the problem that VSCode doesn't use BUILDKIT (removes /debian/changelog workaround)
• This ensures vscode always opens latest version (no prompt from VSCode)
• Don't need to populate build args.

Add tab completion for --distribution

This can probably be read from a hard coded list initially

Expand delete_images function

On top of deleting the debpic images this should

• Stop all debpic containers (this will prevent the deleting of images from failing)
• delete the docker volume

Don't update image if local repository changes

The dockerfile has

• Remote apt repositories.
• Local apt repositories

If the remote apt repositories change then the docker image doesn't have to be rebuilt (however it can be rebuilt with --no-cache).
If the local apt repository changes then the docker image must be rebuilt (because it uses COPY).

This is problematic because:

• Some users have a workflow where they have --local-repository and --destination as the same directory to allow them to build multiple repositories that depend on each other. This is problematic because if you build repo1 successfully it deposits the .debs into it's local repository and invalidates it's cache.
• The user may want to just run "apt update && apt upgrade" for faster updating rather than rebuilding the image.

The local repository stage must happen at build time before other dependencies are installed because a dependency in the control file might only exist in the local repository.

Support signing build with a key

This can probably be achieved by mounting ~/.gnupg (as read only) during the run command

Allow the user to invoke debpic from a child directory

Keep looking for the debian/control file in the parent directories if it's not the current directory until we reach root.

The functionality would be similar to what debuild does
https://github.com/Debian/devscripts/blob/master/scripts/debuild.pl#L674C1-L683C2

--no-cache should remove the ccache cache

Currently --no-cache is only used to remove the docker cache.

Given debpic also uses ccache by default --no-cache should remove the cache volume

Run the command: docker volume rm ccache_volume

Support user defined post_create_hook

Allow the user to run a hook in the container after setup.

The following instructions detail the steps necessary to run "go test ./..." for a debian package. It would be good if those steps could be automated after the container is set up.
https://github.com/aidan-gallagher/debpic/blob/main/debpic/Documentation/using-golang.md

The hook could either change the image or just the container.
I'm going to initially implement it as just the container because:

• It's easier
• The repository has to be mounted for the golang use case.

I expect a number of potentially useful hooks could be distributed by the debpic package. They would live under
/etc/debpic/hooks. The user could then select their hook via the command line arguments or debpic config file.

Consider using entrypoint
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45371521/adding-startup-script-to-dockerfile

Allow dpkg-buildpackage arguments to be specified in config file

This is handy as usually always want "-build=binary" specified.

The read_config function doesn't work for the dpkg-buildpackage arguments
https://github.com/aidan-gallagher/debpic/blob/main/debpic/debpic.py#L249

Support all DEB environment variables

Support all DEB_ and DH_ environment variables (not just DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS)

Consider making DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS an argument rather than environment variable.
* This stops host env variables accidentally being used in container build.
* Makes it possible to add these options to the config file.

Provide example showing debpic integrated with Gitlab

Debpic integrates well with Jenkins. This has been documented here: https://github.com/aidan-gallagher/debpic/blob/main/debpic/Documentation/using-with-jenkins.md

Investigate whether the same is true for gitlab and document it.