rhcephcompose 1.4.1

Distribution compose tool

A tool to gather build artifacts and assemble them into a set of repositories.

rhcephcompose is a distribution compose tool, similar to Red Hat’s Pungi (open-source). In contrast to simply throwing all builds together into a single package repository, these tools give the user fine-grained control over the selection of builds and the layout of the final product’s output.

Composes are release snapshots that contain release deliverables such as installation trees with RPMs and Yum repodata. rhcephcompose creates an installation tree for Ubuntu packages. In Red Hat we use it for developing and shipping the RH Ceph Enterprise product for Ubuntu.

See Also

• rhcephcompose interacts with Koji instance or a Chacra instance. It queries Koji’s API or Chacra’s API for build information and downloads build artifacts stored there. (This is a bit similar to the way Pungi interacts with Koji.)

• After creating a compose, you may wish to GPG-sign it with Merfi.

Note regarding Distro version

In the RHEL world, el6 and el7 repositories are typically separated into two entirely different trees in the filesystem. In Debian, a repository can mix several distribution versions together.

Using Koji, we can tag one build with multiple -candidate tags. In other words, we can tag “ceph-ansible-3.2.0-2redhat1” as both “ceph-3.2-xenial-candidate” and “ceph-3.2-bionic-candidate”.

In dist-git for Ubuntu, I store the branches as “-ubuntu” in order to combine the codebase for “-trusty” and “-xenial”. The reason for this is that I always ended up keeping “ceph-1.2-rhel-6” and “ceph-1.2-rhel-7” identical, and it was a pain to do that manually.

Caching

To save time when accessing chacra, rhcephcompose downloads all build artifacts to a local cache by default. This cache location is $XDG_CACHE_HOME/rhcephcompose/. If the XDG_CACHE_HOME environment variable is unset, rhcephcompose defaults this to ~/.cache (so builds are written to ~/.cache/rhcephcompose).

rhcephcompose never evicts items from this cache so it can grow without bound. It’s a good idea to clean it out occasionally. If you are running rhcephcompose with Jenkins, you can do this automatically by setting $XDG_CACHE_HOME to a location within the job’s workspace, and then have Jenkins simply clean up the workspace.

Metadata

rhcephcompose writes some metadata about the compose into a metadata subdirectory. You can read the basic composeinfo.json file with productmd productmd . rhcephcompose also writes a custom debs.json file with a list of all the builds in each distribution.

SSL errors

This is more of a python-requests thing, but if you receive an SSL warning, it’s probably because you don’t have the Red Hat IT CA set up for your Python environment. Particularly if you’re running this in a virtualenv, you’ll want to set the following configuration variable:

REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE=/etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors/RH-IT-Root-CA.crt

Where “RH-IT-Root-CA.crt” is the public cert that signed the Chacra server’s HTTPS certificate.