transgirlcodes / binarybuilder.jl

Binary Dependency Builder for Julia

BinaryBuilder

"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil"

Quickstart

1. Install BinaryBuilder

Pkg.add("BinaryBuilder")

2. Run the wizard.

using BinaryBuilder
BinaryBuilder.run_wizard()

3. The wizard will take you through a process of building your software package. Note that the wizard may need to download a new rootfs image for each platform targeted, and there are about a dozen of these at the time of writing. The output of this stage is a build_tarballs.jl file, which will be deployed to GitHub. The wizard will also configure Travis and GitHub releases for your package.

4. Once you complete the wizard and your repository is created on GitHub, create a new release on the GitHub Releases page and Travis will automatically upload binaries for all platforms to your GitHub release. It will also upload a build.jl file that you can use in your Julia package to import the binaries you have just built.

5. Not all platforms may be successfully built the first time. Use the iteration workflow described in the Build Tips section of the documentation to debug the breaking builds. Push your changes and tag a new release to test the new platforms.

6. Once you have a build.jl file, you can just drop it into the deps/ folder of your Julia package and use it just like any other build.jl file. When it is run through Pkg.build(), it will generate a deps.jl file, which records the path of every binary listed as a Product during the wizard stage. This allows package startup to be really fast; all your package has to do is include("../deps/deps.jl") (and call check_deps() within __init__(), see the docs of BinaryProvider for more information about this), and it has variables that point to the location of the installed binaries.

For more information, see the documentation for this package, viewable either directly in markdown within the docs/src folder within this repository, or online.

Usage

This package will help you create a distribution of binary dependencies for your julia package. Generally this is accomplished using a dependency-specific buildscript, or build_tarballs.jl file (example) that builds the binary for all platforms. These tarballs are then suitable for installation using BinaryProvider.jl. Currently we recommend creating a separate GitHub repository for the build_tarballs.jl script and using that repository's GitHub Releases page to host the binaries. (Examples for Nettle, OpenBLAS and Openlibm)

The contents of the build_tarballs.jl file is relatively straightforward, but getting it right can be a little tricky.

Philosophy

Building binary packages is a pain. BinaryBuilder follows a philosophy that is similar to that of building Julia itself; when you want something done right, you do it yourself.

To that end, BinaryBuilder is designed from the ground up to facilitate the building of packages within an easily reproducible and reliable environment, ensuring that the built libraries and executables are deployable to every computer that Julia itself will run on. Packages are built using a sequence of shell commands, packaged up inside tarballs, and hosted online for all to enjoy. Package installation is merely downloading, verifying package integrity and extracting that tarball on the user's computer. No more compiling on user's machines. No more struggling with system package managers. No more needing sudo access to install that little mathematical optimization library.

We do not use system package managers.

We do not provide multiple ways to install a dependency. It's download and unpack tarball, or nothing.

All packages are cross compiled. If a package does not support cross compilation, fix the package.