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ebuild-commander

ebuild-commander is a tool designed for installation tests of ebuilds on Gentoo. Inspired by ebuildtester, ebuild-commander tests ebuilds in a Docker container derived from Gentoo stage3 images but allows for finer granularity of control over the tests:

  • Instead of taking merely a single package atom, ebuild-commander accepts a list of shell commands that need to be executed during the test. It is still possible to install a single package with emerge, but multiple packages can be installed together in either one or many emerge invocations. Other commands, like cp, rm, etc., can also be run similarly.

  • ebuild-commander supports full Portage configuration customization. It can use the contents of one or multiple directories on the host machine's file system as the contents of /etc/portage in the Docker container used for the test. package.accept_keywords, package.env, env and package.use can all be fully customized with this method.

  • ebuild-commander supports any alternative container engine whose command-line interface is compatible with Docker (e.g. Podman). Alternative container engines may have advantages over Docker, like the ability to use containers with a non-root user account.

Usage

Basics

The main executable of ebuild-commander is ebuild-cmder, which can read the list of commands to execute for a test from files and/or standard input. For example, this command can be used to install a single package sys-apps/portage using emerge for a test:

# ebuild-cmder <<< "emerge sys-apps/portage"

Note: ebuild-commander may invoke Docker commands like docker run and docker exec directly, so any user account used to run the ebuild-cmder command should have the permission to run those Docker commands. By default, those Docker commands can only be executed using root, so ebuild-cmder should also be started with root. However, under any of these circumstances, ebuild-cmder can be run with a non-root user account:

  • The non-root account is in the docker group.
  • The Docker daemon is running in the rootless mode.
  • An alternative container engine that does not require root privileges, like Podman, is used (see a section down below for more details).
  • A command-line option which causes ebuild-commander to not interact with Docker, like --help and --version, is set.

Using Multiple emerge Commands

Some packages' installation may require multiple emerge commands for bootstrapping, breaking circular dependencies, or other purposes. For example, media-libs/freetype-2.10.4[harfbuzz] requires media-libs/harfbuzz[truetype], but media-libs/harfbuzz-2.8.1[truetype] depends on media-libs/freetype, producing a circular dependency. To install media-libs/freetype[harfbuzz], two emerge invocations are needed: the first one builds media-libs/freetype with the harfbuzz USE flag disabled, and the second one rebuilds it with USE="harfbuzz".

For situations like this, ebuild-commander supports running more than one command in a Docker container. Commands should be separated by a newline, such as:

# cat << _EOC_ | ebuild-cmder
> emerge media-libs/freetype
> env USE="harfbuzz" emerge media-libs/freetype
> _EOC_

Customizing Portage Configuration

ebuild-commander has a --portage-config option for specifying directories containing Portage configuration files that should be used during the test. This option can be set any arbitrary number of times:

  • If this option is not used at all, then the contents of /etc/portage on the host machine's file system will be used as the Portage configuration for the test.

  • If this option is set exactly once, then the contents of the directory at the path specified by the option's value will be used as the Portage configuration for the test.

  • If this option is set more than once, then all specified directories will be used to form a layered Portage configuration. ebuild-commander will copy the contents of each directory into /etc/portage in the Docker container used for the test, in the same order as how they are listed in the command-line arguments.

Note: make.profile and repos.conf will always be ignored. make.profile can be controlled with the --profile option of ebuild-cmder. repos.conf is automatically populated by ebuild-commander according to the settings for the --gentoo-repo and --custom-repo options.

Using an Alternative Container Engine

ebuild-commander uses Docker as the default container engine and thus calls the docker executable for container operations and other Docker functionalities. However, any container engine which provides a command-line interface that is equivalent to Docker's can be used with ebuild-commander.

To specify an alternative container engine, please set the value of environment variable EBUILD_CMDER_DOCKER to the name of the container engine's main executable. For example, the following command runs ebuild-commander with Podman, whose executable is called podman:

$ env EBUILD_CMDER_DOCKER="podman" ebuild-cmder

More Information

For a comprehensive list of command-line arguments recognized by ebuild-commander, please refer to the output of command ebuild-cmder --help.

Dependencies

  • Python 3.9 or above
  • Any container engine whose command-line interface is compatible with Docker, including but not limited to:
    • Docker
    • Podman (requires environment variable setting EBUILD_CMDER_DOCKER="podman")

Installation

On Any System with Python

ebuild-commander can be installed with pip, a commonly-used Python package installer.

All of the following commands assume that the working directory is the root of the ebuild-commander project's source tree.

  • To install ebuild-commander only for the current user, please run pip install --user ..

  • To install ebuild-commander to the system globally so every user can use it, please run pip install . as root.

To uninstall ebuild-commander, please run pip uninstall ebuild-commander. This command can be run anywhere: there is not a working directory requirement for it. Note that:

  • The --user option should not be used, even if ebuild-commander is installed for the current user only.

  • If ebuild-commander is installed to the system globally, this command needs to be run as root too.

On Gentoo

A Gentoo package, dev-util/ebuild-commander, is available in this project's maintainer's personal ebuild repository.

Testing

The ebuild-commander project uses tox as the test runner. To launch tests, please run command tox from any directory under this project's source tree.