Evaggelos Balaskas - System Engineer

GitLab is my favorite online git hosting provider, and I really love the CI feature (that now most of the online project providers are also starting supporting it).

Archlinux uses git and you can find everything here: Arch Linux git repositories

There are almost 2500 packages there! There are 6500 in core/extra/community (primary repos) and almost 55k Packages in AUR, the Archlinux User Repository.

We are going to use git to retrieve our PKGBUILD from aur archlinux as an example.
The same can be done with one of the core packages by using the above git repo.

So here is a very simple .gitlab-ci.yml file that we can use to build an archlinux package in gitlab

image: archlinux/base:latest

before_script:
    - export PKGNAME=tallow

run-build:
  stage: build
  artifacts:
    paths:
    - "*.pkg.tar.xz"
    expire_in: 1 week
  script:
      # Create "Bob the Builder" !
    - groupadd bob && useradd -m -c "Bob the Builder" -g bob bob
      # Update archlinux and install git
    - pacman -Syy && pacman -Su --noconfirm --needed git base-devel
      # Git Clone package repository
    - git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/$PKGNAME.git
    - chown -R bob:bob $PKGNAME/
      # Read PKGBUILD
    - source $PKGNAME/PKGBUILD
      # Install Dependencies
    - pacman -Syu --noconfirm --needed --asdeps "${makedepends[@]}" "${depends[@]}"
      # Let Bob the Builder, build package
    - su - bob -s /bin/sh -c "cd $(pwd)/$PKGNAME/ && makepkg"
      # Get artifact
    - mv $PKGNAME/*.pkg.tar.xz ./

You can use this link to verify the above example: tallow at gitlab

But let me explain the steps:

• First we create a user, Bob the Builder as in archlinux we can not use root to build a package for security reasons.
• Then we update our container and install git and base-devel group. This group contains all relevant archlinux packages for building a new one.
• After that, we git clone the package repo
• Install any dependencies. This is a neat trick that I’ve found in archlinux forum using source command to create shell variables (arrays).
• Now it is time for Bob to build the package !
• and finally, we move the artifact in our local folder