Andaman
Mechanisms

Mechanisms

Andaman is a meta-build system that calls upon other build systems to build packages.

It reads the project manifest in anda.hcl and calls the corresponding build system to build the package. Multiple projects can be included in a single repository (known as a monorepo) recursively in different directories.

The root directory contains a main configuration file (also anda.hcl) and the configurations will be inherited. All the other anda.hcl files in its subdirectory can independently represent multiple projects, and multiple ways to build a package can be specified in each project. Once properly configured, a project can be built by anda build subdirectory_path/project_name.

All configurations should be written in the HashiCorp Configuration Language with the filename anda.hcl and will be parsed in anda-config.

Build Process

When Anda needs to build RPMs, it first loads all the anda.hcl configuration files, then run all executable pre_scripts. Then, Anda will build RPMs, Flatpak, Podman and Docker artifacts, then run the build scripts and finally the post_scripts.

All the scripts in Anda can either be a command that can be executed with sh -c, or a path to an AndaX script with the extension .rhai. Other package types are processed as follows:

  • RPM: Anda calls either mock or rpmbuild depending on the --rpm_builder option which defaults to mock.
  • Flatpak: The manifest is read using the flatpak crate and the application is built using flatpak-builder.

    As of 0.1.17, the output is always located at .flatpak-builder/build/, as opposed to anda-build/ used by other package types.

  • Docker/Podman: Anda calls docker build or podman build.

AndaX

AndaX is an embedded scripting system powered by Rhai (opens in a new tab). It is mainly for supporting automatic updates, but it is also the scripting system used behind pre_script and post_script.

AndaX loads all the Rhai module script files from the following paths:

  • /usr/lib/anda/
  • /usr/local/lib/anda/
  • /usr/lib64/anda/
  • /usr/local/lib64/anda/
  • ~/.local/lib/anda/

The following static modules (built into AndaX directly) are also available:

  • io
  • tsunagu
  • kokoro
  • tenshi
  • anda::rpmbuild
  • anda::cfg

Most if not all of the functions in the above static modules are well-documented in the Terra documentation.

You can pass labels into the AndaX executor during with the --labels command-line argument. A label is a key-value pair that can be used to tag packages (is it a nightly package?), adding special variables, etc.

Different labels should be separated by commas, like so:

--labels commit_sha=abc1234,environment=gh_ci,key_value_pair=k=v

Which will be parsed to:

{
  "commit_sha": "abc1234",
  "environment": "gh_ci",
  "key_value_pair": "k=v"
}

Automatic Updates

See Terra autoupdate documentation for supported functions in AndaX

Anda has supports automatically updating packages via the anda update command. The command finds all the projects with the file update.rhai in the same directory or if the configuration file has the update property set to a value:

project project_name {
  update = "path/to/update_script.rhai"
  labels {
    a = "1"
  }
}

Then, AndaX executes the scripts in parallel, where each update script gets its own thread. This greatly reduces the time required to fetch package versions. Note that Rhai does not support asynchronous programming. Around 200 update scripts in Terra can be processed under a second.

Projects can also be filtered by adding --filters key=value,key2=value2 to the command. For example, the update script for the above project will be executed for --filters a=1 or even without filters related to a, but it won't be executed for --filters a=2.

Installation