BuildStream inside Docker

If your system cannot provide the base system requirements for BuildStream, then it is possible to run buildstream within a Docker image.

The BuildStream project provides Docker images containing BuildStream and its dependencies. This gives you an easy way to get started using BuildStream on any Unix-like platform where Docker is available, including Mac OS X.

We recommend using the bst-here wrapper script which automates the necessary container setup. You can download it and make it executable like this:

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
curl --get https://gitlab.com/BuildStream/buildstream/raw/master/contrib/bst-here > ~/.local/bin/bst-here
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/bst-here

Check if ~/.local/bin appears in your PATH environment variable – if it doesn’t, you should edit your ~/.profile so that it does.

Once the script is available in your PATH, you can run bst-here to open a shell session inside a new container based off the latest version of the buildstream Docker image. The current working directory will be mounted inside the container at /src.

You can also run individual BuildStream commands as bst-here COMMAND. For example: bst-here show systems/my-system.bst. Note that BuildStream won’t be able to integrate with Bash tab-completion if you invoke it in this way.

Two Docker volumes are set up by the bst-here script:

• buildstream-cache – mounted at ~/.cache/buildstream

• buildstream-config – mounted at ~/.config/

These are necessary so that your BuildStream cache and configuration files persist between invocations of bst-here.