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OSBUILD(1) User Commands OSBUILD(1)

NAME

osbuild - Build-Pipelines for Operating System Artifacts

SYNOPSIS

osbuild [ OPTIONS ] MANIFEST
osbuild [ OPTIONS ] -
osbuild --help
osbuild --version

DESCRIPTION

osbuild is a build-system for operating system artifacts. It takes an input manifest describing the build pipelines and produces file-system trees, images, or other artifacts as output. Its pipeline description gives comprehensive control over the individual steps to execute as part of a pipeline. osbuild provides isolation from the host system as well as caching capabilities, and thus ensures that pipeline builds will be deterministic and efficient.

OPTIONS

osbuild reads the pipeline description from the file passed on the command-line. To make osbuild read the pipeline description from standard input, pass -.

The following command-line options are supported. If an option is passed, which is not listed here, osbuild will deny startup and exit with an error.

print usage information and exit immediately
print version information and exit immediately
directory where intermediary file system trees are stored
directory containing stages, assemblers, and the osbuild library
maximum size of the cache (bytes) or 'unlimited' for no restriction (size may include an optional unit suffix, like kB, kiB, MB, MiB and so on)
stage to commit to the object store during build (can be passed multiple times)
object to export (can be passed multiple times)
output results in JSON format
directory where result objects are stored
return the manifest in JSON format including all the ids
name of the monitor to be used
file-descriptor to be used for the monitor
set the maximal time (in seconds) each stage is allowed to run
open debug shell when executing stages; accepts stage name or id (from --inspect) or * (for all)

NB: If neither --output-directory nor --checkpoint is specified, no attempt to build the manifest will be made.

MANIFEST

The input to osbuild is a description of the pipelines to execute, as well as required parameters to each pipeline stage. This data must be JSON encoded. It is read from the file specified on the command-line, or, if - is passed, from standard input.

The format of the manifest is described in osbuild-manifest(5). The formal schema of the manifest is available online as the OSBuild JSON Schema [1].

MONITOR

Live activity of the pipeline execution can be monitored via a built-in set of different monitors. The --monitor=TYPE option selects the type of monitor that is used. Valid types are:

No live coverage is reported and all monitoring features are disabled. This is the default monitor if --json was specified on the command-line.
A human-readable live monitor of the pipeline execution. This monitor prints pipeline names, stage names, and relevant options of each stage as it is executed. Additionally, timing information is provided for each stage. The output is not machine-readable and is interspersed with the individual log messages of the stages. This is the default monitor if --json was not specified.

Monitor output is written to the file-descriptor provided via --monitor-fd=NUM. If none was specified, standard output is used.

OUTPUT

OSBuild only ever builds the requested artifacts, rather than all artifacts defined in a manifest. Each stage and pipeline has an associated ID (which can be acquired by passing --inspect). To export an artifact after a stage or pipeline finished, pass its ID via --export=ID. A sub-directory will be created in the output-directory with the ID as the name. The contents of the artifact are then stored in that sub-directory.

Additionally, any completed pipeline or stage can be cached to avoid rebuilding them in subsequent invocations. Use --checkpoint=ID to request caching of a specific stage or pipeline.

EXAMPLES

The following sub-sections contain examples on running osbuild. Generally, osbuild must be run with superuser privileges, since this is required to create file-system images.

Example 1: Run an empty pipeline

To verify your osbuild setup, you can run it on an empty pipeline which produces no output:

# echo {} | osbuild -



Example 2: See pipeline IDs of a Fedora qcow2 image

To inspect a basic qcow2 image of Fedora, use:

# osbuild ./samples/fedora-boot.json



The pipeline definition ./samples/fedora-boot.json is provided in the upstream source repository of osbuild.

This will print out the pipeline IDs of the provided manifest but will not actually build anything because no artifact was requested. The pipeline IDs can then be passed to --export= to actually get the requested artifacts.

Example 3: Build a Fedora qcow2 image

To build a basic qcow2 image of Fedora, use:

# osbuild --output-dir ./out --export image ./samples/fedora-boot.json



Note that the command requires to be run as root. It will create an out/image directory and put the generated "disk.img" there.

Example 4: Run from a local checkout

To run osbuild from a local checkout, use:

# python3 -m osbuild --libdir . --output-dir ./out --export image samples/fedora-boot.json



This will make sure to execute the osbuild module from the current directory, as well as use it to search for stages, assemblers, and more.

SEE ALSO

osbuild-manifest(5), osbuild-composer(1)

NOTES

[1]
OSBuild JSON Schema v2: https://osbuild.org/schemas/osbuild2.json