2.9 KiB
Standalone Linux Packages
This directory contains the build scripts for creating:
- A self-contained binary executable for the HTTPie itself
httpie.deb
andhttpie.rpm
packages for Debian and Fedora.
The process of constructing them are fully automated, and can be easily done through the Release as Standalone Linux Package
action. Once it finishes, the release artifacts will be attached in the summary page of the triggered run.
Hacking
The main entry point for the package builder is the build.py
. It
contains 2 major methods:
build_binaries
, for the self-contained executablesbuild_packages
, for the OS-specific packages (which wrap the binaries)
build_binaries
We use PyInstaller for the binaries. Normally pyinstaller offers two different modes:
- Single directory (harder to distribute, low redundancy. Library files are shared across different executables)
- Single binary (easier to distribute, higher redundancy. Same libraries are statically linked to different executables, so higher total size)
Since our binary size (in total 20 MiBs) is not that big, we have decided to choose the single binary mode for the sake of easier distribution.
We also disable UPX
, which is a runtime decompression method since it adds some startup cost.
build_packages
We build our OS-specific packages with FPM which offers a really nice abstraction. We use the dir
mode,
and package http
, https
and httpie
commands. More can be added to the files
option.
Since the httpie
depends on having a pip executable, we explicitly depend on the system Python even though the core does not use it.
Docker Image
This directory also contains a docker image which helps
building our standalone binaries in an isolated environment with the lowest possible library versions. This is important, since even though
the executables are standalone they still depend on some main system C libraries (like glibc
) so we need to create our executables inside
an environment with a very old (but not deprecated) glibc version. It makes us soundproof for all active Ubuntu/Debian versions.
It also contains the Python version we package our HTTPie with, so it is the place if you need to change it.
./get_release_artifacts.sh
If you make a change in the build.py
, run the following script to test it out. It will return multiple files under artifacts/dist
which
then you can test out and ensure their quality (it is also the script that we use in our automation).