Sharpie / puppet-build-experiment

Testbed for experiments in building puppet-agent

Puppet Build Experiment

A 1000% expermental set of tools for building puppet-agent. Anything related to or produced by this repo may change or be deleted at any moment.

The code in this version of the repository cross-compiles the puppet-agent package for Raspbian using a Debian 10 x86_64 container running the official Debian crossbuild-essential-armhf tools. This approach provides decent build speed while also running in an x86_64 environment, which is the easiest to find in 2021. A dis-advantage is that the Debian cross build tools target the ARMv7 architecture and newer. The Raspberry Pi 0 and 1 use a ARMv6 CPU which means that the puppet-agent binaries will fail to run on those platforms with an "illegal instruction" error.

Usage

To use the automation in this repo, you will need the following dependencies:

• Docker
• Ruby 2.4 or newer, with the bundler gem installed
• If building on Linux, qemu-user-static to provide support for running cross-compiled ARM binaries via binfmt_misc.
• The jq tool is optional, but can be helpful for manipulating JSON.

You will also need at least 4 GB of RAM or swap available to avoid oomkills during C++ compilation.

Once the above dependencies are installed, clone the project and use Bundler to install the items listed in the Gemfile:

bundle install --path=.bundle/lib

The puppet-agent packages provided by this repo are built using the Vanagon build command. This command must be executed from the top directory of the repository in order for relative paths to resolve properly.

The builds are designed to run inside a Docker container that provides a cross-compilation environment. This container is configured using environment variables:

• VANAGON_DOCKER_IMAGE: Docker image to use in the build. The container must run a SSH daemon that listens to port 22 as Vanagon uses SSH to execute commands and Rsync-over-SSH to transfer files.
• VANAGON_DOCKER_RUN_ARGS: Arguments to pass to docker run when launching the image. Usually file systems that must be mounted for SystemD to start.
• VANAGON_SSH_PORT: The ssh port that Docker should expose.
• VANAGON_SSH_KEY: The ssh key that Vanagon should use.

Example

The following example builds puppet-agent 6.21.1 for Debian 10 ARM using a Docker container provided by sharpie/puppet-dev-images:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hashicorp/vagrant/master/keys/vagrant
chmod 0600 vagrant

export VANAGON_SSH_KEY="${PWD}/vagrant"
export VANAGON_SSH_PORT=4222

export VANAGON_DOCKER_IMAGE='ghcr.io/sharpie/debian-10-amd64:latest'
docker pull "${VANAGON_DOCKER_IMAGE}"
export VANAGON_DOCKER_RUN_ARGS=$(docker inspect "${VANAGON_DOCKER_IMAGE}" --format '{{ index .Config.Labels "docker-run-args" }}')

agent_version=6.21.1
runtime_version=$(curl -sSL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/puppetlabs/puppet-agent/${agent_version}/configs/components/puppet-runtime.json"|jq --raw-output '.version')

VANAGON_BUILD_VERSION=$runtime_version bundle exec build puppet-runtime debian-10-armhf -e docker
VANAGON_BUILD_VERSION=$agent_version bundle exec build puppet-agent debian-10-armhf -e docker

The build_puppet-agent_debian-10-armhf.yaml action demonstrates applying the above example to an Ubuntu 20.04 VM.