Apicius is a build tool with an early collection of predefined recipes to build app container images (ACIs) compatible with the App Container specification, e.g. CoreOS's container runtime Rocket. I won't address the benifits of using ACIs except they're very lightweight which makes them fast to build, load and boot. As an example, the pre-built Nginx container is 1.3MB, the equivalent PostgreSQL container is 6.2MB. These pre-built app container images are available on the apicius release page.
The idea is to clone this repository, create some recipes which hook-up to your CI service and start pushing app container images to your container scheduler. The apicius tool is just a convenience tool to automate the building, signing and uploading of your containers.
Apicius and its recipes are tested to run on CoreOS. Other Linux systems which support systemd-nspawn should work but your milage may vary.
$ apicius --sign --upload github recipes/nginx
Usage: apicius [-ehksu] [-u service] [recipe]
Build, sign and upload app container images (ACI)
-e load environment from file
-h show help message
-k keep the temporary build directory
-s generate a signature with GnuGP
-u service upload image and signature, available services: github
A recipe is a directory containing the main build executable and any content needed by the build script. The contents of the recipes/nginx recipe:
./build
./extra/nginx.conf
The build executable for the recipes/nginx recipe is a bash script:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e
# Start the build with an empty ACI
acbuild --debug begin
...
# Name the ACI
acbuild --debug set-name namsral.com/nginx
...
# Install nginx
acbuild --debug run apk update
acbuild --debug run apk add nginx
...
# Copy files
acbuild --debug copy ./extra/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
...
This script runs the acbuild tool from CoreOS to build the app container image.
You can either run the pre-built images from the release page or build your own.
The following examples assume you're using Rocket on CoreOS. Guides for both are available on coreos.com.
The pre-built image are signed, and for Rocket to validate the signatures trust the public key in order to verify the image's signature:
$ sudo rkt trust --prefix=namsral.com https://github.com/namsral/apicius/blob/gh-pages/dist/aci-pubkeys.gpg
Fetch and run the images:
$ rkt fetch https://github.com/namsral/apicius/releases/download/beta/nginx-latest-linux-amd64.aci
$ mkdir -p /data/pods/nginx/conf.d /data/pods/nginx/www
$ sudo rkt run --port=http:80 --volume confd,kind=host,source=/data/pods/nginx/conf.d --volume www,kind=host,source=/data/pods/nginx/www,readOnly=false namsral.com/nginx
Install the acbuild tool from the acbuild release page or compile it yourself using Docker.
In order to build your own images you can start with the recipes from the apicius repo:
$ git clone https://github.com/namsral/apicius .
Setup your environment file;
$ vi ./environment
...
export PATH=/home/core/bin:$PATH
...
Make chances to the recipes if needed and run the build script:
$ ./apicius recipes/nginx
Bulding ACI in /tmp/tmp.61trBfduiy
...
$ ls -1
nginx-latest-linux-amd64.aci
To sign your images, you'll need to setup a GnuPG key, import the public key in Rocket and setup the GnuPG environment:
$ sudo rkt trust --prefix=<your prefix> ./pubkeys.gpg
$ vi ./environment
...
export GNUPGHOME=...
...
$ apicious -e ./environment -s recipes/nginx
$ ls -1
nginx-latest-linux-amd64.aci
nginx-latest-linux-amd64.aci.asc
Now you're ready to load and run your app container image.
$ rkt fetch ./nginx-latest-linux-amd64.aci
$ mkdir -p /data/pods/nginx/conf.d /data/pods/nginx/www
$ sudo rkt run --port=http:80 --volume confd,kind=host,source=/data/pods/nginx/conf.d --volume www,kind=host,source=/data/pods/nginx/www,readOnly=false namsral.com/nginx
Or upload them to your storage service for your container runtime to fetch them.
To upload your images to a GitHub release page you'll need to setup your GitHub environment, see the environment file.
$ vi ./environment
...
export GHTOKEN=...
...
$ apicious -e ./environment -s -u github recipes/nginx
...
Run the following commands on a CoreOS host:
$ cd $(mktemp -d)
$ git clone https://github.com/appc/acbuild .
$ ./build-docker
Include the new binary in your PATH:
$ mkdir -p /home/core/bin
$ cp ./bin/acbuild /home/core/bin/
$ PATH=/home/core/bin:$PATH
tested on CoreOS beta (877.1.0)
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