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acbuild

acbuild is a command line utility to build and modify App Container Images (ACIs), the container image format defined in the App Container (appc) spec.

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Rationale

Dockerfiles are powerful, and feature useful concepts such as build layers and a controlled build environment. At the same time, they lack flexibility (impossible to extend, re-use environment variables) and don't play nicely with the appc spec and Linux toolchain (e.g. shell, makefiles)

acbuild is a command-line tool that natively supports ACI builds and integrates well with the shell, Makefiles, and other Unix tools.

Installation

Dependencies

acbuild can only be run on a Linux system, and has only been tested on the amd64 architecture.

For trying out acbuild on Mac OS X, it's recommended to use Vagrant. Instructions on how to do this are a little further down in this document.

acbuild requires a handful of commands be available on the system on which it's run:

  • systemd-nspawn
  • cp
  • modprobe
  • gpg

Prebuilt Binaries

The easiest way to get acbuild is to download one of the releases from GitHub.

Build from source

The other way to get acbuild is to build it from source.

Follow these steps to do so:

  1. Grab the source code for acbuild by git cloneing the source repository:

    cd ~
    git clone https://github.com/appc/acbuild
    
  2. Run the build script from the root source repository directory:

    cd acbuild
    ./build
    

    Or, if you want to build in docker (assuming $PWD exists and contains acbuild/ on your Docker host):

    cd acbuild
    ./build-docker
    
  3. A bin/ directory will be created that contains the acbuild tool. To make sure your shell can find this executable, append this directory to your environment's $PATH variable. You can do this in your .bashrc or similar file, for example:

    vi ~/.bashrc
    

and put the following lines at the end of the file:

export ACBUILD_BIN_DIR=~/acbuild/bin
export PATH=$PATH:$ACBUILD_BIN_DIR

Trying out acbuild using Vagrant

For users with Vagrant 1.5.x or greater, there's a provided Vagrantfile that can quickly get you set up with a Linux VM that has both acbuild and rkt. The following steps will grab acbuild, set up the machine, and ssh into it.

git clone https://github.com/appc/acbuild
cd acbuild
vagrant up
vagrant ssh

Documentation

Documentation about acbuild and many of its commands is available in the Documentation directory in this repository.

Examples

Check out the examples directory for some common applications being packaged into ACIs with acbuild.

Related work

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