JayH5 / alpine-pypy

Docker-based builds for PyPy on Alpine Linux

alpine-pypy

Note: New builds/images of PyPy will use the latest Alpine Linux release available as of the release of that version of PyPy. The Alpine Linux version will be included in the name of the built archive going forward. Also, new Docker images will be released only with the full PyPy and Alpine Linux versions included in the tag.

Docker-based builds for PyPy on Alpine Linux.

These are unofficial builds maintained by one person who hasn't yet figured out how to automate builds that take 1hr+ on dedicated VMs without spending lots of money. For downloads, see the releases page. For the Docker images used to build PyPy see this Docker Hub page. For Docker images that use these PyPy builds, see the JayH5/docker-alpine-pypy repository.

Currently, PyPy is only built for glibc/GNU-based Linux distributions, namely, Debian and Ubuntu. Recently, the Alpine Linux distribution has been gaining in popularity as a base OS for containers, due to its small size and container-friendly tools. A big way that Alpine achieves its small size is through its use of musl as its C standard library and BusyBox as its set of Unix tools. This means that PyPy binaries compiled for glibc/GNU are not compatible with Alpine Linux.

This repository seeks to make it easy to build PyPy for Alpine Linux.

Docker images

Docker images are provided for building PyPy:

• alpine-pypy-build:$PYPY_VERSION-bootstrap-$ALPINE_VERSION: Images to build PyPy from source using cPython.
• alpine-pypy-build:$PYPY_VERSION-$ALPINE_VERSION: Images to build PyPy from source using an existing PyPy binary.

Where:

• $PYPY_VERSION is of the form {2.7,3.6}-$VERSION (e.g. 2.7-7.3.0)
• $ALPINE_VERSION is of the form alpine$VERSION (e.g. alpine3.6)

Building

From scratch

PyPy requires a Python implementation in order to build itself. The recommended implementation to use is PyPy itself as it is much faster than standard cPython. But if you don't have a PyPy binary in the first place you'll have to settle for cPython.

The first step is to get the bootstrap image which you can either build from source or pull from Docker Hub:

cd 2.7/alpine3.11
docker build -t alpine-pypy-build:2.7-bootstrap-alpine3.11 -f bootstrap/Dockerfile .

or..

docker pull jamiehewland/alpine-pypy-build:2.7-7.3.0-bootstrap-alpine3.11

Then things should be as simple as running the container with a mounted volume:

docker run --rm -it -v "$(pwd)/tmp:/tmp" jamiehewland/alpine-pypy-build:2.7-7.3.0-bootstrap-alpine3.11

Unless you have a really fast computer this will take several hours. As the PyPy people say: Enjoy Mandelbrot :-).

Once this is all done, the built PyPy package should be at ./tmp/usession-release-$PYPY_VERSION-1/build on the container host. $PYPY_VERSION is defined in the Dockerfile, but it's also possible to override the version that PyPy is packaged as by setting the $PYPY_RELEASE_VERSION environment variable.

With an existing PyPy binary

PyPy compiles several times faster using itself rather than cPython. In general, we can use older versions of PyPy to build newer ones. The PyPy builder is based on the non-builder image.

docker run --rm -it -v "$(pwd)/tmp:/tmp" jamiehewland/alpine-pypy-build:2.7-7.3.0-alpine3.11

Notes on building PyPy on Alpine Linux

There are a few workarounds for differences between Alpine Linux and the Debian-based Linux distributions that the PyPy team has thus far worked against.

Issues when building all versions of PyPy

• The standard Python package currently in the Alpine package repositories has an issue that prevents PyPy from compiling. The bootstrap image is based on the Alpine variety of the python:2 Docker image which instead builds Python from source.

Issues when building PyPy for Python 2

• In PyPy2.7 7.3.1, when building the CFFI bindings for the curses module, the wint_t type is not in scope on Alpine Linux for some reason. We have to include the wchar.h header which defines that type. (This was also the case with PyPy3.5 5.9.0 but was eventually fixed.)

Issues when building PyPy for Python 3

• RPython expects the stdin/stdout/stderr file handles in stdio.h of the standard libc to be of type FILE*. With musl these are of type FILE *const rather (see this mailing list thread). We patch RPython with the correct type.
• Alpine Linux doesn't include some common time types by default. This seems to be a common problem when compiling code on Alpine: see here or here. We patch PyPy's "cpyext" module to include sys/time.h.