Artifact Caches¶

BuildStream revisions output of each element under it’s specific cache key in a local artifact cache.

This artifact cache can however be shared with others, or automated builders can be made to contribute to a shared artifact cache so that developers dont need to build everything all the time, instead they can download prebuilt artifacts from a shared cache, if an artifact is available for the specific cache keys they need.

This page outlines how to setup and use a shared artifact cache.

Setting up the user¶

A specific user is not needed for downloading artifacts, but since we are going to use ssh to upload the artifacts, you will want a dedicated user to own the artifact cache.

useradd artifacts

Installing the receiver¶

You will also need to install BuildStream on the artifact server in order to receive uploaded artifacts over ssh. Follow the instructions for installing BuildStream here

When installing BuildStream on the artifact server, it must be installed in a system wide location, with pip3 install . in the BuildStream checkout directory.

Otherwise, some tinkering is required to ensure BuildStream is available in PATH when it’s companion bst-artifact-receive program is run remotely.

You can install only the artifact receiver companion program without requiring BuildStream’s more exigent dependencies by setting the BST_ARTIFACTS_ONLY environment variable at install time, like so:

BST_ARTIFACTS_ONLY=1 pip3 install .

Initializing the cache¶

Now that you have a dedicated user to own the artifact cache, change to that user, and create the artifact cache ostree repository directly in it’s home directory as such:

ostree init --mode archive-z2 --repo artifacts

This should result in an artifact cache residing at the path /home/artifacts/artifacts

Serve the cache over https¶

This part should be pretty simple, you can do this with various technologies, all we really require is that you make the artifacts available over https (you can use http but until we figure out using gpg signed ostree commits for the artifacts, it’s better to serve over https).

Here is an example, note that you must have a certificate pem file to use, as is the case for hosting anything over https.

import http.server, ssl, os

# Maybe use a custom port, especially if you are serving
# other web pages on the same computer
server_address = ('localhost', 443)
artifact_path = '/home/artifacts'

# The http server will serve from it's current
# working directory
os.chdir(artifact_path)

# Create Server
httpd = http.server.HTTPServer(
    server_address,
    http.server.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler)

# Add ssl
httpd.socket = ssl.wrap_socket(httpd.socket,
                               server_side=True,
                               certfile='localhost.pem',
                               ssl_version=ssl.PROTOCOL_TLSv1)

# Run it
httpd.serve_forever()

Configure and run sshd¶

You will need to run the sshd service to allow uploading artifacts.

For this you will want something like the following in your /etc/ssh/sshd_config

# Allow ssh logins/commands with the artifacts user
AllowUsers artifacts

# Some specifics for the artifacts user
Match user artifacts

     # Dont allow password authentication for artifacts user
     #
     PasswordAuthentication no

     # Also lets dedicate this login for only running the
     # bst-artifact-receive program, note that the full
     # command must be specified here; 'artifacts' is
     # the HOME relative path to the artifact cache.
     # The exact pull URL must also be specified.
     ForceCommand bst-artifact-receive --pull-url https://example.com/artifacts --verbose artifacts

Summary file updates¶

BuildStream uses the OSTree summary file to determine what artifacts are available in the remote artifact cache. ostree summary -u updates the summary file. This command cannot be run concurrently and thus it cannot be executed by bst-artifact-receive, it has to be triggered externally.

A simple way to configure this is to set up a cron job that triggers the summary file update every 5 minutes. E.g., create /etc/cron.d/artifacts with the following content:

*/5 * * * * artifacts ostree --repo=/home/artifacts/artifacts summary -u

User Configuration¶

The user configuration for artifacts is documented with the rest of the user configuration documentation.

Assuming you have the same setup used in this document, and that your host is reachable on the internet as artifacts.com (for example), then a user can use the following user configuration:

#
#    Artifacts
#
artifacts:

  url: https://artifacts.com/artifacts

  # Alternative form if you have push access to the cache
  #url: ssh://artifacts@artifacts.com:22200/artifacts

Authenticating Users¶

In order to give permission to a given user to upload artifacts, simply use the regular ssh method.

First obtain the user’s public ssh key, and add it to the authorized keys, like so:

cat user_id_rsa.pub >> /home/artifacts/.ssh/authorized_keys