Include:Setup your system and account for building packages

The alpine-sdk is a metapackage that pulls in the most essential packages used to build new packages.
Install those packages now:

apk add alpine-sdk

This would be a good time to create a normal user account for you to work in. (You weren't going to develop as root now, were you!) To create the user:

adduser <yourusername>

To make life easier later, it's a good idea to add this user to /etc/sudoers. Append the line

<yourusername>    ALL=(ALL) ALL

using the command:

visudo

Now logout of the root account, and login as <yourusername>. From here on everything can be done in a normal user account, and operations that require superuser privileges can be done with sudo.

The aports tree is in git so before we clone the aports tree we should configure git.

git config --global user.name "Your Full Name" git config --global user.email "your@email.address"

Read carefully Development using git to grasp basic Git operations and configure email patches sending.

Now we can clone the aports tree.

git clone git://dev.alpinelinux.org/aports

Before we start creating or modifying APKBUILD files we need to setup abuild to our system/user. Edit the file abuild.conf to your requirements. Most of the defaults can be left alone, unless you are developing for a custom platform, in which case the comments in the file should guide you. The one field to edit is PACKAGER, so that you can get credit (or blame) for packages you create.

sudo vi /etc/abuild.conf

We also need to prepare the location that the build process caches files when they are downloaded. By default this is /var/cache/distfiles. To create this directory and ensure that it is writeable, enter the following commands:

sudo mkdir -p /var/cache/distfiles

sudo chmod a+w /var/cache/distfiles

Or add yourself to the abuild group

sudo addgroup <yourusername> abuild

The last step in preparation is to configure the security keys with the abuild-keygen script for abuild with the command:

abuild-keygen -a -i