wilbur

Wilbur: Your OpenWRT Build Assistant

This project provides a comprehensive infrastructure for building and provisioning OpenWRT images easily and in an automated fashion.

For more information about OpenWRT, please check http://openwrt.org

Project structure

• openwrt_release: here you specify the name of the release targeted for build and deployment
• flavors/: contains the different kernel and rootfs configurations used to build working OpenWRT images
  • flavors.yml: serves as a db of flavor configurations. Used to provide more understanding over each configuration and for referencing them more easily by the user.
  • <flavor_name>/: contains all files related to the specific flavor
    • dot_config: Buildroot configuration file used to specify kernel configuration and packages to compile/install in the final image
    • patches/: contains all diff patches to be applied to the OpenWRT's source code prior to building it
• provisioning/: contains the resources used to provision project's virtual machines
  • manifests/: contains the Puppet manifests used to bring up the building and provisioning VMs
  • scripts/: contains the scripts used with Vagrant to aid Puppet provisioning

Usage

At the moment, all facilites are provided as Thor commands. Also, Bundler is used to contain the project in its own folder.

To start using the builder, just let Bundler do its work:

bundle install --path vendor/bundle

Then, to see a list of the available commands, run:

bundle exec thor -T

To see a description of the use cases supported by the project, read on this doc file.

Declaring OpenWRT release to build

In the project's root folder there's a file named openwrt_release. This file must contain a single line with the name of the specific OpenWRT release you want to build (e.g. attitude_adjustment). If you want to build bleeding edge, just set it to openwrt.

Internals

The name specified in openwrt_release is used to build the URL of the source repository to clone locally (so format matters). Basically, source will be fetched from

git://nbd.name/<openwrt_release>.git

To provide this same name to Puppet during provisioning, some "pre-provisioning" is done prior to running Puppet; during this step, a custom executable fact will be added to the building machine, named openwrt_release, that will read the content of the file in the shared project folder. This way, you can specify the release you want to use once and not worry about synchronizing names between building app and provisioning manifest.

Building a specific flavor

You can easily start a build by invoking the build task:

bundle exec thor build <flavor>

To obtain a list of available flavors, you can ask thor:

bundle exec thor flavor_list

This will return the list of available flavors. Each row will be in the form:

<flavor name> <flavor description>

The description is there to clarify what the flavor's purpose is; you can just pick the name and pass it over to the build task.

Also, additional options are available for the build command:

• --verbose: let the compilation process be verbose about what's doing (useful for debugging)
• --nuke: prior to start compilation, delete everything that is not bare source code. Note that in standard operation mode, build command already wipes the output of previous run(s), so in normal circumstances this flag is not needed. You may need it if you mess with the configuration and want to restart with a clean environment. For more information, have a look at make distclean Buildroot command.

NOTE: At the moment, when the build process ends, nothing is done to gather the produced files. For now, you have to ssh into the builder box and find the kernel and rootfs under attitude_adjustment/bin/<arch>/.

Changelog

0.0.2

• Add wilbur executable

0.0.1

• Introduce layout database generator