Poudriere

I build my own FreeBSD pkgs and you can do that too! And here are a few notes how to do it. Important note make sure you have enough RAM or/and an SWAP partition. I found out the hard way that 8GB RAM are not good enough. So I added a 30GB SWAP partition how much you really need depends heavily on which ports you build.

poudriere

So the first step is to install poudriere the thing that builds your ports automatically and does all the magic, and a web-server. I used Nginx but if like Apache there are example configs for both. More on how to setup that later.

$ pkg install poudriere nginx
$ cat /usr/local/etc/poudriere.conf
# poudriere.
#
ZPOOL=zroot

# the host where to download sets for the jails setup
# You can specify here a host or an IP
# replace _PROTO_ by http or ftp
# replace _CHANGE_THIS_ by the hostname of the mirrors where you want to fetch
# by default: ftp://ftp.freebsd.org
#
# Also note that every protocols supported by fetch(1) are supported here, even
# file:///
# Suggested: https://download.FreeBSD.org
FREEBSD_HOST=https://download.FreeBSD.org

# By default the jails have no /etc/resolv.conf, you will need to set
# RESOLV_CONF to a file on your hosts system that will be copied has
# /etc/resolv.conf for the jail, except if you don't need it (using an http
# proxy for example)
RESOLV_CONF=/etc/resolv.conf

# The directory where poudriere will store jails and ports
BASEFS=/usr/local/poudriere

# Use portlint to check ports sanity
USE_PORTLINT=yes

# Use tmpfs(5)
# This can be a space-separated list of options:
# wrkdir    - Use tmpfs(5) for port building WRKDIRPREFIX
# data      - Use tmpfs(5) for poudriere cache/temp build data
# localbase - Use tmpfs(5) for LOCALBASE (installing ports for packaging/testing)
# all       - Run the entire build in memory, including builder jails.
# yes       - Only enables tmpfs(5) for wrkdir
# EXAMPLE: USE_TMPFS="wrkdir data"
USE_TMPFS=yes

# If set the given directory will be used for the distfiles
# This allows to share the distfiles between jails and ports tree
DISTFILES_CACHE=/usr/ports/distfiles

# Automatic Dependency change detection
# When bulk building packages, compare the dependencies from kept packages to
# the current dependencies for every port. If they differ, the existing package
# will be deleted and the port will be rebuilt. This helps catch changes such
# as DEFAULT_RUBY_VERSION, PERL_VERSION, WITHOUT_X11 that change dependencies
# for many ports.
# Valid options: yes, no
CHECK_CHANGED_DEPS=yes

# Path to the RSA key to sign the PKGNG repo with. See pkg-repo(8)
PKG_REPO_SIGNING_KEY=/usr/local/etc/ssl/keys/pkg.key

# ccache support. Supply the path to your ccache cache directory.
# It will be mounted into the jail and be shared among all jails.
CCACHE_DIR=/var/cache/ccache

# Choose the default format for the workdir packing: could be tar,tgz,tbz,txz
# default is tbz
WRKDIR_ARCHIVE_FORMAT=txz

# Disable linux support
NOLINUX=yes

# URL where your POUDRIERE_DATA/logs are hosted
# This will be used for giving URL hints to the HTML output when
# scheduling and starting builds
URL_BASE=http://poudriere.l33t.network/

# Keep older package repositories. This can be used to rollback a system
# or to bisect issues by changing the repository to one of the older
# versions and reinstalling everything with `pkg upgrade -f`
# ATOMIC_PACKAGE_REPOSITORY is required for this.
# Default: no
KEEP_OLD_PACKAGES=yes

# Define pkgname globs to boost priority for
# Default: none
PRIORITY_BOOST="llvm*"

The config is mostly self explaining. The only thing I would highlight is that you should install and enable ccache since it can speed up your build significantly. As you can see the packages are getting signed by /usr/local/etc/ssl/keys/pkg.key. To do that you need to create this key and here is how:

mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/ssl/keys /usr/local/etc/ssl/certs
chmod 600 /usr/local/etc/ssl/keys
openssl genrsa -out /usr/local/etc/ssl/keys/pkg.key 4096
openssl rsa -in /usr/local/etc/ssl/keys/pkg.key -pubout > /usr/local/etc/ssl/certs/pkg.cert

I would recommend to backup this key to a save location. Also we need these two directory to be present for poudriere.

mkdir -p /var/cache/ccache
mkdir -p /usr/ports/distfiles

I build my own packages mostly to live a life on the edge, so I configured my Makefile to use all the latest software versions. This is the same config I would use uf I build ports locally, but instead of /etc/make.conf its /usr/local/etc/poudriere.d/11amd64-make.conf (jailname-make.conf). To find which versions are available I recommend to look in bsd.default-versions.mk. So my Makefile looks like this:

# cat /usr/local/etc/poudriere.d/11amd64-make.conf
DEFAULT_VERSIONS= mysql=10.1m php=7.0 python3=3.6 ruby=2.4

Now we need to create the portstree and create a jail. I only use on portstree and one jail but you can use multiple without a problem. For example to build i368 and amd64 ports on the same build server.

# create portstree
poudriere ports -c
# create a jail
poudriere jail -c -j 11amd64 -v 11.0-RELEASE -a amd64

We are almost done, here is a example list with some ports I like to build. A good place to search for port names is freshports.

% cat ~/pkglist
editors/vim-lite
www/nginx
multimedia/plexpy
multimedia/plexmediaserver-plexpass
devel/ruby-gems
sysutils/rubygem-bundler

You may also want to change some options for some ports, and it's easy just:

poudriere options -p category/port

I use it mostly with the addition of -n to configure only that port and keep the defaults for all dependent ports.

Finally!

Now we can update our portstree and build our ports for the first time! Warning: Depending on your portlist and your pc/server this can take several hours, so maybe just build what you really need or buy fast hardware.

poudriere ports -u
poudriere bulk -f ~/pkglist -j 11amd64

Nginx

While writing this I realized that this sounds like a lot of work but trust me, it's up and running in ~ 20 minutes. Basically you could just copy the packages which where just build and install them. But it's very convenient to distribute them with Apache or Nginx they have some example configs. So here is my config:

$ cat /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
load_module /usr/local/libexec/nginx/ngx_mail_module.so;
load_module /usr/local/libexec/nginx/ngx_stream_module.so;

#user  nobody;
worker_processes  1;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    sendfile        on;
    #tcp_nopush     on;

    #keepalive_timeout  0;
    keepalive_timeout  65;

    
    gzip on;
    gzip_http_version 1.0;
    gzip_comp_level 6;
    gzip_proxied any;
    gzip_min_length  1100;
    gzip_buffers 16 8k;
    gzip_types text/plain text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript image/gif image/jpeg image/png application/json image/svg+xml;

    types {
        text/plain                            log;
    }

    server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  poudriere.l33t.network;
        root         /usr/local/share/poudriere/html;
            
            # Allow caching static resources
            location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|svg|woff|css|js|html)$ {
            add_header Cache-Control "public";
            expires 2d;
        }

        location /data {
            alias /usr/local/poudriere/data/logs/bulk;

            # Allow caching dynamic files but ensure they get rechecked
            location ~* ^.+\.(log|txz|tbz|bz2|gz)$ {
                add_header Cache-Control "public, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate";
            }
            # Don't log json requests as they come in frequently and ensure
            # caching works as expected
            location ~* ^.+\.(json)$ {
                add_header Cache-Control "public, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate";
                access_log off;
                log_not_found off;
            }
            # Allow indexing only in log dirs
            location ~ /data/?.*/(logs|latest-per-pkg)/ {
                autoindex on;
            }
            break;
        }

        location /packages {
            alias /usr/local/poudriere/data/packages;
            autoindex on;
        }
    }
}

Install your packages

To simplify the task I create a setup directory which the two important files pkg.cert and poudriere.conf. And add this below the location /packages block.

location /setup {
   alias /usr/local/share/poudriere/setup;
   autoindex on;
}

The poudriere.conf files looks something like this:

poudriere: {
  url: "http://poudriere.l33t.network/packages/11amd64-default",
  mirror_type: "http",
  signature_type: "pubkey",
  pubkey: "/usr/local/etc/ssl/certs/pkg.cert",
  enabled: yes
}

Now we can just create two directories and fetch these two files.

mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos
mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/ssl/certs

fetch http://poudriere.l33t.network/setup/pkg.cert -o /usr/local/etc/ssl/certs/
fetch http://poudriere.l33t.network/setup/poudriere.conf -o /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/

Since you just downloaded these files over http, it's a good idea to check the content, since theoretically anyone could tamper with them. Also recommend to disable the official packages if you don't know how to mix and match them.

echo "FreeBSD: { enabled: no }" > /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf

Now you use pkg as you would normally.

Update your ports

So now the only thing is to update your ports from time to time like this:

poudriere ports -u
poudriere bulk -f ~/pkglist -j 11amd64

And you might also want to update the jail it self from time to time.

sudo poudriere jail -u -j 11amd64 # update the jail sometimes!

Thats it have fun with your custom build packages!