CKAN Packaging Scripts

These scripts are used to build Debian packages (deb files) for CKAN releases.

Overview

To create Debian packages of CKAN, install Vagrant and Ansible and run:

./ckan-package -v dev-v2.8 -i 1

If you omit the parameters you will be prompted for them.

After Vagrant and Ansible have done their thing (it will take a while), you should end up with three deb files on the working folder:

python-ckan_dev-v2.8-trusty1_amd64.deb
python-ckan_dev-v2.8-xenial1_amd64.deb
python-ckan_dev-v2.8-bionic1_amd64.deb

Keep reading for more options and to learn how it works.

How it works

This repository contains a Vagrant environment configured in a multi-machine setup.

Each machine is running one of the supported distributions that we target, currently:

• Ubuntu 14.04 64bit (trusty)
• Ubuntu 16.04 64bit (xenial)
• Ubuntu 18.04 64bit (bionic)

We use Ansible to provision the Vagrant machines, which results in the creation of the package. Ansible is configured via playbooks. These are a set of configurations and tasks that are run in the remote server. The file we use is package.yml and it is quite straight-forward to follow what is going on.

The actual packaging is done in the building maching by FPM, a tool that aims to make building packages quickly and easily.

To pass parameters like the CKAN version or the iteration to the Vagrant file and ultimately to Ansible we need to use env vars. To make this a little bit more convenient, the ckan-package script is included, which essentially sets up the necessary env vars and calls vagrant up or vagrant provision as appropiate.

Install and setup

1. Install Vagrant. On an Ubuntu machine:

   sudo apt-get install vagrant
   

   Or for an OSX machine use the installer at https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html

2. Install Ansible. If you have a virtualenv you can install it in that:

   pip install ansible
   

   Otherwise simply install it globally:

   sudo easy_install ansible
   

3. Checkout this repository in your virtualenv or elsewhere:

   git clone https://github.com/ckan/ckan-packaging.git
   cd ckan-packaging
   

You are now ready to build packages.

Building a package

Packages are built using the ckan-package script. Check the following for a full list of options and parameters:

./ckan-package --help

Most of the times you will want to run something like the following:

./ckan-package -v dev-v2.8 -i 1

Where:

• -v (version) relates to the CKAN branch or tag to build, eg master, dev-v2.6, release-v2.5.3
• -i (iteration) e.g. beta1 for a beta or for a proper release use a number e.g. 1

This will build three packages successively, one for trusty, one for xenial and one for bionic. If you only want to target one distribution, you can pass the -t parameter:

./ckan-package --version dev-v2.8 --iteration 1 --target bionic

The first time that you run the build commands Vagrant will need to download the OS images from the central repository, this might take a while. After the first run, the image will be already on your machine so it won't take as much. Most of the steps in the Ansible playbook (like installing required packages) will be also skipped, so subsequent builds should be much faster.

You will see the output of the different tasks, both for Vagrant and Ansible. Once the process is finished, you should see a summary of the tasks. All tasks should be ok or changed.

The packages will be created in the same directory.

TODO: upload the packages to S3 (http://packaging.ckan.org/build/).