Add a local dependency to an ACI in acbuild

Question

I'm currently experimenting with ACI construction for rkt-containers. During my experiments I've built some containers especially for the use as a dependency. I now want to use these .aci images as a dependency for other images. As these files are fetched by name (for example "quay.io/alpine-sh"), I wonder if there is a way to refer to actual local .aci files.

Is there a way to import these .aci files from the local filesystem or do I have to set up a local webserver to serve as a repository?

Answer 1

Dependencies in acbulid (at least till version 0.3) can be defined only as http-links, so you need to make your aci available through http to use it as dependency in acbuild. It's not so hard to publish your aci to make it available through http. Image archive can be actually hosted on github or bitbucket.

The recent versions of acbuild seem to support it since the relating issue (cache dependencies across acbuild invocations #144) is closed.

Cached ACI's are stored in directories depstore-tar and depstore-expanded inside $CONTEXT_ROOT/.acbuild. If we save somehow content of those directories between acbuild init, acis won't be downloaded over and over again.

When i played with acbuild i was so annoyed that acbulid redownloads dependencies on every build. I've written script https://bitbucket.org/legeyda/anyorigin/src/tip/acbuild-plus which configures symbolic links inside $CONTEXT_ROOT/.acbuild to point to persistence directories inside /var/lib/acbuild/hack. The usage is simple:

acbuild begin
acbuild-plus init target

After that all dependencies will be cached by acbuild.

You can also manually install aci-file to be available to acbuild. This is as simple as

acbulid-plus install <your-image.aci>

I've tested the script with acbuild v0.3.0. You can get an example of using it in the Makefile next to acbuld-plus in the repository.