Creating an Alpine package

This page documents the procedure to create and submit new package in Alpine Linux.

Overview

This is a brief list of the steps to create and submit new package in Alpine Linux. Please see the rest of this wiki for details on the steps.

1. Create an account on https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org
2. Setup the build environment.
3. Fork the aports repository and clone your fork .
4. Set git pull.rebase=true, Configure your git username and email.
5. Create and switch to a new branch (don't use master).
6. Add a new directory under testing that is your new package name.
7. Add your APKBUILD file.
8. Run abuild checksum
9. Make sure you run the apkbuild-lint and aport -r and there are no warnings.
10. Commit your APKBUILD with the commit message: 'testing/packagename: new aport'
11. Push your changes to your fork on https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine.
12. Create a merge request.

Requirements

Setup your system and account for building packages in Alpine Linux. If you do not have Alpine Linux already, refer to Setting up the build environment.

Getting help

See also: Abuild and Helpers

The abuild package provides scripts necessary for creating packages for Alpine Linux. It implements functionality for building packages as well as additional commands and options for package maintenance. It might be wise to start by checking what the abuild program can/cannot do.

abuild -h

For realtime help, you can also go on #alpine-devel on IRC.

A reference for APKBUILD files is available as APKBUILD Reference wiki page or a man page in the abuild-doc package:

man APKBUILD

Creating an APKBUILD file

See also: APKBUILD examples

The APKBUILD examples page lists a number of APKBUILD examples ranging from Simple APKBUILD to subpackages and various Application specific examples. These examples will assist you in understanding how to create an APKBUILD and provide snippets to use in your own APKBUILD files.

Use a template APKBUILD

Alpine Linux has the following tools to create a template APKBUILD file.

newapkbuild

The newapkbuild tool, which is installed as part of the abuild package, can generate a new APKBUILD template to use as a starting point. The manual page (available via man newapkbuild) describes all options for newapkbuild.

If you doubt to which repository your package belongs to you can safely use testing. Building package in your aports/testing directory is not mandatory but this way the package is already at the right place.

Tip: Follow the package naming conventions mentioned in package policies while choosing a packagename.

The following command will create a directory with the given package name, place an example/template APKBUILD file in the directory, and fill some variables if those are provided.

newapkbuild packagename

If you are creating a daemon package which needs initd scripts you can add the -c option as follows:

newapkbuild -c packagename

This will copy the sample initd and confd files to the build directory. A third file sample.install file will be copied as well (we will discuss this later on).

apkbuild-cpan

The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) provides a large collection of perl software and documentation. apkbuild-cpan helps with the creation of APKBUILD for perl modules from CPAN.

apkbuild-cpan [create <Module::Name> | check | recreate | update | upgrade]

This command is provided by the apkbuild-cpan package.

apkbuild-pypi

The Python Package Index (PyPi) is a repository of software and libraries for the Python programming language. The apkbuild-pypi command helps with the creation of APKBUILD for python package hosted at PyPI.

apkbuild-pypi [create <package> | check | recreate | update | upgrade

This command is provided by the apkbuild-pypi package.

Modify your APKBUILD

Edit APKBUILD and fill in the needed info (especially pkgname, pkgver, pkgdesc, url, license, depends and source).

If you are going to use any of the variables for directories like $pkgdir, always make sure they are double quoted like:

"$pkgdir"/somedir

This will prevent issues with spaces/special characters in the future.

Note: If you like syntax highlighting we suggest you to install vim. We have setup vim to recognize the APKBUILD file as a bash scripts so its easier to read them.

APKBUILD variables/functions

source

The source variable is not only used to list the remote source files to fetch, it is also used to list the local files that abuild will need in order to build the apk. Examples of such local files include: init.d files, conf.d files, install files (see install variable), patches, and all other necessary files.

Here are few things to note:

• When you are finished adding local and/or remote files to source, you can execute the following command to add their checksums to the APKBUILD file:

abuild checksum

Note: When later updating the content of source, or updating a file that is listed in source, you must also update their checksums again with the same command.

• When the remote file is hosted at SourceForge, it's best to specify the special mirrors link used by SourceForge:

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/$pkgname/$pkgname-$pkgver.tar.gz

(or similar depending on the package).

• When the remote filename is not specified in the URI (ie, does not end in '/software-1.0.tar.gz'), such as:

http://oss.example.org/?get=software&ver=1.0

You must prepend '${pkgname}-${pkgver}.tar.gz::' to the protocol, like so:

source="${pkgname}-${pkgver}.tar.gz::http://oss.example.org/?get=software&ver=1.0"

This causes the file to be saved as software-1.0.tar.gz where abuild can use it, instead of ?get=software&ver=1.0, where abuild cannot use it.

• Some projects didn't provide a release tarball. Beware that some git services (gitweg, cgit, …?) doesn’t provide stable tarballs, so when you point source to an tarball like https://repo.or.cz/w/gitstats.git/snapshot/ad7efbb9399e60cee6cb217c6b47e604174a8093.tar.gz, then you will run into issues because the checksum changes when downloading on the build system. This is not a problem on GitHub, GitLab and other decent services provides, they provide stable tarballs.

• abuild currently supports the following protocols for remote file retrieval:
  • http
  • https
  • ftp

• abuild currently supports the following archive types/archive file extensions:
  • .tar
  • .tar.gz / .tgz
  • .tar.bz2
  • .tar.lz (only in Alpine >=3.7)
  • .tar.lzma
  • .tar.xz
  • .zip

depends & makedepends

Depends are the actual running dependencies that a package would need when it is running. Makedepends are only needed when you are building a package. If you set a package in depends, you do not need to add it to makedepends as well. The best way to find out what the depends and makedepends of a package are is to RTFM.

No kidding, lots of important information can be found in the package INSTALL and README files (or the likes). Another good way is the run ./configure --help from the source directory to see which options are needed for configure to finish without errors. If you do not yet have a source directory you can create one with the command:

abuild unpack

Running configure will also show you how you can disable a specific option for this package. For instance, a good example is "--disable-nls" which will disable native language support and thus does not depend on gettext (libiconv, glib, ...).

Alpine likes to keep things small, so we try to disable as much as possible without losing too many features. The exact disable/enable options are decided by the package builder but please try to follow Alpine's design concept as much as possible.

An easy way of quickly finding out the build info for a package is to check Arch Linux (Alpine package management and build scripts are similar) or Gentoo Linux ebuilds (previous versions of Alpine were based on Gentoo).

• Gentoo Ebuilds
• Arch Linux packages Arch Linux User Repository

license

The license tag must reflect the license of the source code. Please check the source tarball for COPYING, LICENSE, or other files with names that indicates that it contains licensing information. Beside the license file most developer include headers in the source code files with licensing details.

If the license is on the SPDX License List or SPDX License Exceptions, use the identifier specified by SPDX.

Note that some licenses have additional requirements that should be adhered to. The MIT license for example has the requirement:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice (including the next paragraph) shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

This means that we need to include the license as shipped with the project.

Known licenses that require this:

• MIT
• ISC

If a package has a special/custom license or is not listed as OSI approved, use the identifier "custom". In that case we need to provide the license file with the package as well.

Because we want to save space and don't like to have licenses all over our system we have decided to include the license in the doc subpackage. Please follow the following guidelines to add a proper license. Locate the license file inside the source package. Add the doc subpackage to the $subpackages variable as follows:

subpackages="$pkgname-doc"

Add a similar line to the following to your package() function, depending on the license description file:

install -Dm644 COPYING "$pkgdir"/usr/share/licenses/$pkgname/COPYING

If you follow these steps then abuild will automatically add the license to the package-doc apk for you.

Warning: It is not acceptable to package software with "unknown" license! If you can't find the license of the source code, please contact the author and ask them to specify the license.

arch

The package architecture(s) to build for. This can be one of: x86, x86_64, all, or noarch, where all means all architectures, and noarch means it's architecture-independent (e.g., a pure-python package).

Tip: To determine if your APKBUILD can use noarch, build the package for your architecture and then run "scanelf -R pkg" from the directory that the APKBUILD resides in, in order to scan for ELF files in the ./pkg directory. If you do NOT get output from this, then noarch can be used.

url

Website address for the program. This is useful later on when either finding documentation or other information about the package.

pkgdesc

A brief, one line, description of what the package does. Useful for the package management system. It should start with a capital letter and does not end with a period.

Here is an example from apk_info for the OpenSSH client package:

pkgdesc="Port of OpenBSD's free SSH release - client"

pkgver

Provide the release number of the package you are building.

pkgrel

The $pkgrel versioning is made so that if you change something in your APKBUILD file without changing the actual $pkgver, you can increment pkgrel so apk tools will detect it as an update. For instance, if you forget to add a dependency, you can add it afterward and you can +1 pkgver so apk finds this update and adds the missing dependency. When there's an upstream version change, we reset the pkgrel to 0.

pkgname

The base name of the package you are creating. For Freeswitch 1.0.6, you would use "freeswitch"

install

There are 6 different kinds of install scripts. Each script is called with the $pkgname.<action> where <action> is one of the following:

$pkgname.pre-install

This script is executed before package is installed. Typical use is when package needs a group and a user to be created. For example:

#!/bin/sh

addgroup -S clamav 2>/dev/null
adduser -S -D -H -s /bin/false -G clamav -g clamav clamav 2>/dev/null

exit 0

Note the exit 0 at the end. If the script exits with failure (if the user already exist), the package will not be installed and apk add will exit with failure.

$pkgname.post-install

This script is executed after the package is installed.

$pkgname.pre-upgrade

Same as pre-install but is executed before upgrading/downgrading/reinstalling an already installed package. Note that exiting with failure will not cause apk to exit with failure, but will mark the package as broken.

$pkgname.post-upgrade

Same as post-install but is executed after upgrading/downgrading/reinstalling an already installed package.

$pkgname.pre-deinstall

This script is executed before uninstalling a package. If script exits with failure apk will not uninstall the package.

$pkgname.post-deinstall

This script is executed after a package have been uninstalled. For example, can be used to restore busybox links:

#!/bin/sh
busybox --install -s

If the package has a pre-install and post-install script the APKBUILD should have the install variable defined:

...
install="$pkgname.pre-install $pkgname.post-install"

...

subpackages

Tip: Refer to the example subpackages to assist you in understanding how to create them.

$subpackages are made to split up the normal "make install" into separate packages. The most common subpackages we use are doc and dev. Because we like to keep our target system small we move documentation and development files (only needed when building packages) into separate packages. To use the specific program a user only need to install the base apk without package-doc or package-dev, but if he wants to read the manual he will need to install package-doc.

The easiest way to find out if you need to use -dev and -doc is to first build the package without these options set and wait until the build finishes. When its finished you should have a pkg directory which is the fake root directory. Inside this directory you will see the structure as how it would be installed in / on the target system.

To see if you need the -dev package you can run the following cmd:

find pkg/usr/ -name '*.[acho]' -o -name '*.la'

If this returns any files you need to include the -dev package.

To see if you need the -doc package you can run the following cmd:

find pkg/usr/share -name doc -o -name man -o -name info -o -name html -o -name sgml -o -name licenses

If this returns any directories you need to include the -doc package.

Custom subpackages

Some software additionally has non-essential files that do not qualify as either documentation or development content. These files should be placed in their own, specialized subpackage(s). Some packages include large test suites which are only needed in specific circumstances or binaries which have depends which we prefer not to install. To handle those we create our own package/function. In the APKBUILD below the build() function we create another function:

test() {
       mkdir -p "$subpkgdir"/usr
       mv "$pkgdir"/usr/package-test "$subpkgdir"/usr/
       # or amove usr/package-test
}

We also need to add the package info to $subpackages variable:

subpackages="$pkgname-doc $pkgname-dev $pkgname-test"

After we finish building the package you should see another apk called packagename-test.apk which includes the files which we moved to the $subpkgdir dir.

The above mentioned variables can also be used in our custom function. If we want for instance to build the test() function with perl support we would add:

depends="perl"
makedepends="perl-dev"

If we would install the base package it would not install perl, but if we install the package-test package it would.

Patches

Note: Follow the coding style while creating patches.

Please make sure you always submit human readable patches. Ways to create them are:

To do a directory compare:

diff -Nurp original_directory new_directory > filename.patch

To do a file compare:

diff -up original.file new.file > filename.patch

If a patch contains a completely new file but not *.rej or *.orig file, you need to add -N option to diff, but you may need to add exclusions with --exclude PATTERN so that you do not inadvertently add files. You may need to manually delete unwanted files inside the patch file.

Because multiple patches can patch the same file, they can change the offsets required by subsequent patches. To make sure we always patch in a specific way, we should number the patches as follows:

10-patch1.patch 20-patch2.patch 30-patch3.patch

This way we are always sure that patch 1 is applied first, and if we want to add additional patches between them we can use appropriate indexes (e.g. 11, 12, 21, 22).

Add the names of the patch files to the source variable. If you haven't declared a custom prepare function, no further action is necessary. Otherwise, be sure to call default_prepare in your prepare function. For example:

prepare() {
	default_prepare

	# do your stuff
}

Note: Some older packages contain a for loop in the prepare function to apply patches. This is not needed anymore, as patches are handled by default_prepare.

In Alpine >=3.4 you can define patch_args to supply the patch level. This only works if all the patches have the same patch level. If there are a lot of patches from different sources, there is a good chance that you may need to edit them, as discussed below.

To automatically patch the package (available only in Alpine >=3.4) if it uses a patch level (-pX) other than the default (-p1), you need to carefully modify the patch. First, you'll need a text editor that does not automatically convert between Windows and Unix new lines (or, disable this feature) so that it preserves the old code. The next thing you'll need to do is modify the paths on "+++" and "---" lines in the .patch file. You can begin the path with a/ and b/ like shown below. Next, you need to adjust the paths so that the relative base path is from inside $builddir. Anything to the left of $builddir, including $builddir itself, needs to be removed from the path. So, if $builddir is /home/USER/aports/community/chromium/src/chromium-65, you need to erase it on the "+++" and "---" lines. Inside the chromium-65 folder you can see a src folder that has 3rdparty as a descendant. If a patch originally has a deeper patch level, you may need to fill in the missing portion of the path. For example, use the find . -name "Assertions.cpp" command to find the full path to the file relative to the base.

Contents of example.patch

Author: John Doe <johndoe@mail.com> URL: http://..... Summary: Fixes musl compatibility ---- --- a/src/3rdparty/chromium/third_party/WebKit/Source/wtf/Assertions.cpp.orig +++ b/src/3rdparty/chromium/third_party/WebKit/Source/wtf/Assertions.cpp @@ -142,7 +142,7 @@ }; FrameToNameScope::FrameToNameScope(void* addr) : m_name(0), m_cxaDemangled(0) { -#if OS(MACOSX) || (OS(LINUX) && !defined(__UCLIBC__)) +#if OS(MACOSX) || (OS(LINUX) && defined(__GLIBC__)) Dl_info info; if (!dladdr(addr, &info) || !info.dli_sname) return;

Portions of the patch may be outdated, removed completely as in the source code file completely removed, or moved or renamed files. You need to delete that section of the patch or find where that section of code changed and re-diff it.

It is good etiquette to give credit at the top and the location of where you originally found them with notes.

Excluding patches with global variable resembling patch_opts is not available on Alpine. To exclude patches you need to create your own custom prepare().

If you have a monolithic patch where there are a bunch of patches in one big patch, you could use filterdiff which is available in the patchutils package.

Just do something like:

makedepends="patchutils"

prepare() {
  ...
  cd "$builddir"
  filterdiff -x '*drivers/video/logo*' "$srcdir"/original.patch > "$builddir"/modified.patch
  patch -p1 -i "$builddir"/modified.patch
}

You need to put the wildcard pattern in single quotes for it to work.

Configure options

Alpine has some default configure options we set by default. We use /usr for prefix to make sure everything is installed with /usr in front of it. If you notice that anything is installed in the wrong directory please run

./configure --help

and see if you can set the correct location.

We are not covering the depend switches here we have discussed this already in the depend section.

Make options

If you notice weird problems when compiling or installing the package with make/make install you could try to disable parallel building/installing. A normal make line would be:

make

To disable parallel we use:

make -j1

We can use the same for make install.

Because we do not want to install the package in our build environment but we want to install it in a fake root directory we need to tell 'make install' to use another destination directory instead of '/'. We do this by setting a variable when we execute make install as followed:

make DESTDIR="$pkgdir" install

Please note that some Makefiles do not support this variable and will always install software in '/'. To make sure you do not mess up your build system NEVER run your build system as root but always use a custom user and doas when needed. If by accident the Makefile does not support DESTDIR variable it will fail to install in our build system system directories.

builddir

If you used newapkbuild to create your APKBUILD file, you must specify the path to your unpacked sources. Inside the sections during the prepare/build/install process builddir is used. Most of the time a combination of $srcdir and $pkgname-$pkgver will work. When not, check the /src directory or the source tarball for the right string. Especially when you are working with automatically generated tarballs (like from github and gitorious), this needs to be adjusted.

builddir="$srcdir"/$pkgname-$pkgver

Additional files

If you want/need to install additional files not mentioned above you can use the following cmd (this is an example of a conf file):

install -Dm644 doc/$pkgname.conf "$pkgdir"/etc/$pkgname.conf

Build the package

See also: Building packages

If you did not already create the checksums as mentioned above you can do so now:

cd $pkgname abuild checksum

It's about time we build our package. Because a build system should never have all the package installed to prevent linking to packages we don't want it to link we use a abuild recursively with the -r switch. It will install all dependencies from your repository and builds it, afterwards it will uninstall all those depending packages again.

abuild -r

Testing the package locally

See also: Development using git:Quality assurance

When it completes, your package will be found in a subfolder of ~/packages. You may want to test it on your machine but only if the package is not a critical system package like musl or apk-tools package. To avoid borking your system (as in making it impossible to use apk add or to restore back the system and the compiler toolchain) for a critical system package, you should test on a chroot first before using it live.

The best way to test a package locally is to modify your /etc/apk/repositories so that it includes the indexes to your locally built packages - the directories that contain ARCH/APKINDEX.tar.gz. For example the /etc/apk/repositories below includes locally built packages in testing, community and main. To use this example change USER to your login name.

Contents of /etc/apk/repositories

/home/USER/packages/testing/ /home/USER/packages/main/ /home/USER/packages/community/ https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/community https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing

If you prefer to test a package without changing any other configuration you can use the -X, --repository option to apk:

doas apk add --repository /home/USER/packages/testing $pkgname

Code review

See also: Package_policies

To successfully have your package pass through code reviewers (as of Feb 18, 2018 are nmeum and jirutka on GitHub) and possible increased acceptance, the following conventions as laid in the below references need to be followed:

• aports/CODINGSTYLE.md
• aports/COMMITSTYLE.md

Note: Run the linter tool apkbuild-lint from atools package: $ apkbuild-lint APKBUILD

1. Custom global variables should be prefixed with underscore (_).
2. Compact code as in merged commands, removed unused variables, removal of functions that do the same thing that are automatically handled by abuild.
3. Versioning is done properly. For details see APKBUILD_Reference#pkgver.
4. Licensing is done properly. Remove unnecessary copying of licensing that is already OSI approved.
5. Naming conventions rules for unofficial variables as in _gitrev is preferred over commit.
6. Indent with tabs not spaces.
7. Removal of explicit return 1. (They are still found the old APKBUILD files if you are learning but are now strongly discouraged.)
8. Disabling check() requires either (1) a comment (#) stating next to options="!check" that there is no test suite/unit tests or (2) functioning working check() function.
9. Explicit call to subpackages="$pkgname-doc" must be used instead of explicit gzip man page compression.
10. Ideally, lines should be no more than 80 columns wide

Commit your work

After you successfully build your package and properly followed the conventions and requirements in the code review section, you can submit your APKBUILD to Alpine's git repository.

Update your git repo, before adding new files:

cd $aportsdir git pull

This should pull all the changes made by others into your local git repo.

When you think you are ready you can add your files to git:

NOTE: when using our Gitlab instance, you can create MR's for each package. Please squash all commits related to the same package into a single one per MR.

cd $aportsdir git add testing/$pkgdir (include any other files needed for the build; $pkgname.install...) git commit

Use the following commit message template for new aports (without the comments):

Contents of template

testing/$pkgname: new aport # this will be the subject line # a blank line $url # project homepage $pkgdesc # one line description

Or you could add the following and chmod +x ports/.git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg to automatically generate commit message which the default aports/.githooks/ does not:

Contents of aports/.git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg

#!/bin/sh case "$2,$3" in ,|template,) if git diff-index --diff-filter=A --name-only --cached HEAD \ | grep -q '/APKBUILD$'; then meta() { git diff --staged | grep "^+$1" | sed 's/.*="\?//;s/"$//';} printf 'testing/%s: new aport\n\n%s\n%s\n' "$(meta pkgname)" \ "$(meta url)" "$(meta pkgdesc)" "$(cat $1)" > "$1" else printf '%s\n\n%s' `git diff-index --name-only --cached HEAD \ | sed -n 's/\/APKBUILD$//p;q'` "$(cat $1)" > "$1" fi;; esac

Now your changes are only available locally in your repository.

Because you do not have push rights to the Alpine aports repository you need to create a merge request to Alpine's GitLab instance.

Alternatively you can also create a diff (patch) of the changes you made and send this patch to the alpine-aports mailinglist.

To create a diff patch:

git format-patch HEAD^

or if you have sprunge, you can create a link to your patch for convenience:

git format-patch HEAD^ --stdout | sprunge

Automated flagging of outdated ports

Consider adding your port to Anitya, so it will be flagged as outdated as soon as a new stable version is released by upstream.

See also

• APKBUILD Reference
• APKBUILD examples
• Development using git:Quality assurance
• Package policies
• aports/COMMITSTYLE.md
• aports/CODINGSTYLE.md