We write and build our PKGBUILD files in our local machine, but we need to make sure our build script is portable and up to date with the required dependencies.

If you've built a CI before, you already know that Docker is a de facto solution for this. You should create a container, install the dependencies to build Arch Linux package, and then build your PKGBUILD to check the success result.

Creating the container

First, we should install the docker package and start its service:

sudo pacman -S docker
sudo systemctl start docker.service

Then, start an interactive container using the Arch Linux image as base:

sudo docker run -it archlinux bash

Preparing the container

We should add the base-devel package group to our container - these packages are required to build packages ourselves. The Arch Linux team is working in a new docker image archlinux:devel with this package group pre-installed.

And, Git if we want to test a PKGBUILD hosted in the AUR repository.

pacman -Sy --noconfirm base-devel git

💡 Tip: Maybe you need to check the /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist file to get a good bandwidth based on your geolocation.

Add a non-root user

For security reasons, makepkg can't run as root, but we need to add a user with sudo to build the package.

useradd builduser -m # Create the builduser
passwd -d builduser # Delete the buildusers password
printf 'builduser ALL=(ALL) ALL\n' | tee -a /etc/sudoers # Allow the builduser passwordless sudo

Now, change the user:

su builduser && cd

Cloning the AUR package

We can clone the AUR package without using an AUR helper, like yay. We'll use the .Net Core app we visited in the previous post.

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/taskcore.git

Build the package

And now we can build and install our package

makepkg -si --noconfirm

Then, clean the orphan packages that we don't need on runtime:

pacman -Rns $(pacman -Qtdq)

Automate the build process

We can create a Dockerfile to run the build steps without an interactive terminal.

FROM archlinux

RUN pacman -Sy --noconfirm base-devel git

ARG AUR_PACKAGE=taskcore

RUN useradd builduser -m \
  && passwd -d builduser \
  && cd /home/builduser \
  && git clone "https://aur.archlinux.org/$AUR_PACKAGE.git" target \
  && chown builduser -R target \
  && (printf 'builduser ALL=(ALL) ALL\n' | tee -a /etc/sudoers) \
  && sudo -u builduser bash -c 'cd ~/target && makepkg -si --noconfirm' \
  && pacman -Rns $(pacman -Qtdq)

WORKDIR /home/builduser/target

CMD ["bash"]

We can build other packages using the --build-arg argument:

sudo docker build --build-arg AUR_PACKAGE=git-delta -t git-delta .

Run the package!

Don't forget to run the package to check the runtime dependencies.

docker run -it taskcore
taskcore ls

New base-devel image! (Update 2020-11-06)

The ticket was closed and the new archlinux:base-devel image is available, with a current size of 700MB vs 467MB for archlinux:latest (a.k.a. archlinux:base).