Development

When developing osctl, osctld or other components, it is necessary to have a fast way to change the code and see the results. The standard deployment process forces you to build all gems, even those without changes, push the gems to rubygems repository, then build the OS, boot it and finally test the program. Rinse and repeat.

To make the process faster, there is a way to mount the source codes into the OS running within VM. All components have a default.nix file, which makes it possible to use nix-shell to automatically setup the environment in which you can test the changed code immediately.

While this text assumes you're developing in a VM run with make qemu, you can use this method to develop on any machine running vpsAdminOS. The difference would be only in how you make the source codes available, e.g. mount over NFS or clone the git repository locally.

Configuration

To make the source codes available in the VM, you have to configure qemu to share those directories and then mount them within the VM. For nix-shell to work, you also need to mount nixpkgs from the host. Change your os/configs/local.nix to include os/configs/devel.nix:

{ config, pkgs, lib, ... }:
{
  imports = [
    ./devel.nix
  ];

  ...
}

Building and starting the VM

The OS will need read-write access to the sources. This is rather unfortunate, but bundler tries to create some temporary files and fails if the directory is read-only. This means that qemu has to be run as root, in order to have access to your files:

$ export NIX_PATH=/where/is/your/nix/path
$ sudo -E make qemu

Entering the development environment

For example, to work on osctl, you can:

$ ssh -p 2222 root@localhost

[root@vpsadminos:~]# cd /mnt/vpsadminos/osctl

[root@vpsadminos:/mnt/vpsadminos/osctl]# nix-shell
[... nix-shell setup ...]
[... bundle setup ...]

[nix-shell:/mnt/vpsadminos/osctl]$ which osctl
/tmp/dev-ruby-gems/bin/osctl

Edit sources on the host, then launch osctl within the nix-shell in the VM and the changed code will be run.

If you'd like to work on osctld, you'll need to stop it as a system service first:

$ sv stop osctld

Then you can start it from the source code:

[root@vpsadminos:~]# cd /mnt/vpsadminos/osctld

[root@vpsadminos:/mnt/vpsadminos/osctld]# nix-shell
[... nix-shell setup ...]
[... bundle setup ...]

[nix-shell:/mnt/vpsadminos/osctld]$ run-osctld

Deployment

When you have your work finished and want to commit, you need to build gems and deploy them to the rubygems repository. CI and other people will then be able to build the OS with your changes, without the need to setup the development environment themselves.

By default, the gems are pushed and installed from https://rubygems.vpsfree.cz. Pushing requires authentication, you'll have to ask for credentials. Use nix-shell to enter a prepared environment.

# Configure remote repository for geminabox
$ gem inabox -c

Within nix-shell, you can use make to build gems and the OS:

# Build and push gems
$ make gems

# Rebuild OS with updated gems
$ make

Now you can commit and make a pull request.