Using the Koji build system

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Using Koji in Fedora

The Koji Build System is Fedora's RPM buildsystem. Packagers use the koji client to request package builds and get information about the buildsystem. Koji runs on top of Mock to build RPM packages for specific architectures and ensure that they build correctly.

There is also a simplified Chinese edition.

Installing Koji

Installing the Koji CLI

Everything you need to use Koji (and be a Fedora contributor) can be installed in a single step:

dnf install fedora-packager

fedora-packager provides useful scripts to help maintain and setup your koji environment. Additionally, it includes dependencies on the Koji CLI, so it will be installed when you install fedora-packager. The command is called koji and is included in the main koji package. By default the koji tool authenticates to the central server using Kerberos. You will need to have a valid authentication token to use many features. However, many of the read-only commands will work without authentication.

Koji Config

The global local client configuration file for koji is /etc/koji.conf. You should not need to change this from the defaults for building Fedora packages.These will allow you to use the primary build system as well as secondary arch build systems.

Building with fedpkg targets

Every push is automatically tagged via git. All you have to do to build the package is to run,

fedpkg build

This will trigger a build request for the branch. Easy!

It is also possible to target a specific koji tag as follows:

fedpkg build --target TARGET

for example, if building on rawhide against a special tag created by rel-eng for updating API for many packages, e.g. dist-f14-python you would use the following:

fedpkg build --target 'dist-f14-python'

Chained builds

chain-builds only work when building on the devel/ branch (aka rawhide). To chain-build packages to update a released OS version, set up an override using bodhi requesting packages to be included in the proper buildroot.

Sometimes you want to make sure than one build succeeded before launching the next one, for example when you want to rebuild a package against a just rebuilt dependency. In that case you can use a chain build with:

fedpkg chain-build libwidget libgizmo

The current package is added to the end of the CHAIN list. Colons (:) can be used in the CHAIN parameter to define groups of packages. Packages in any single group will be built in parallel and all packages in a group must build successfully and populate the repository before the next group will begin building. For example:

fedpkg chain-build libwidget libaselib : libgizmo :

will cause libwidget and libaselib to be built in parallel, followed by libgizmo and then the currect directory package. If no groups are defined, packages will be built sequentially.

If a build fail, following builds are cancelled but the builds that already succeeded are pushed to the repository.

Scratch Builds

Sometimes it is useful to be able to build a package against the buildroot but without actually including it in the release. This is called a scratch build. The following section covers using koji directly as well as the fedpkg tool to do scratch builds. To create a scratch build from changes you haven't committed, do the following:

rpmbuild -bs foo.spec
koji build --scratch rawhide foo.srpm

From the latest git commit:

koji build --scratch rawhide 'git url'

Warning: Scratch builds will not work correctly if your .spec file does something different depending on the value of %fedora, %fc9, and so on. Macro values like these are set by the builder, not by koji, so the value of %fedora will be for whatever created the source RPM, and not what it's being built on. Non-scratch builds get around this by first re-building the source RPM.

If you have committed the changes to git and you are in the current branch, you can do a scratch build with fedpkg tool which wraps the koji command line tool with the appropriate options:

fedpkg scratch-build

if you want to do a scratch build for a specific architecture, you can type:

fedpkg scratch-build-<archs>

<archs> can be a comma separated list of several architectures.

finally is possible to combine the scratch-build command with a specific koji tag in the form:

fedpkg scratch-build --target TARGET

fedpkg scratch-build --help or koji build --help for more information.

Build Failures

If your package fails to build, you will see something like this:

420066 buildArch kernel-2.6.18-1.2739.10.9.el5.jjf.215394.2.src.rpm,
ia64): open (build-1.example.com) -> FAILED: BuildrootError:
error building package (arch ia64), mock exited with status 10

You can figure out why the build failed by looking at the log files. If there is a build.log, start there. Otherwise, look at init.log.

Logs can be found via the web interface in the Task pages for the failed task. Alternatively the koji client can be used to view the logs via the watch-logs command. See the help output for more details.

Advanced use of Koji

We've tried to make Koji self-documenting wherever possible. The command line tool will print a list of valid commands and each command supports --help. For example:

$ koji help

Koji commands are:
build                Build a package from source
cancel-task          Cancel a task
help                 List available commands
latest-build         Print the latest rpms for a tag
latest-pkg           Print the latest builds for a tag
[...] 

$ koji build --help

usage: koji build [options]  tag URL
(Specify the --help global option for a list of other help options)

options:
-h, --help            show this help message and exit
--skip-tag            Do not attempt to tag package
--scratch             Perform a scratch build
--nowait              Don't wait on build
[...] 

Using koji to generate a mock config to replicate a buildroot

koji can be used to replicate a build root for local debugging

koji mock-config --help
Usage: koji mock-config [options] name
(Specify the --help global option for a list of other help options)

Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --arch=ARCH           Specify the arch
  --tag=TAG             Create a mock config for a tag
  --task=TASK           Duplicate the mock config of a previous task
  --buildroot=BUILDROOT
                        Duplicate the mock config for the specified buildroot
                        id
  --mockdir=DIR         Specify mockdir
  --topdir=DIR          Specify topdir
  --topurl=URL          url under which Koji files are accessible
  --distribution=DISTRIBUTION
                        Change the distribution macro
  -o FILE               Output to a file

For example to get the latest buildroot for dist-f12-build run:

koji mock-config --tag dist-f12-build --arch=x86_64 --topurl=http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/ dist-f12

You will need to pass in --topurl=http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/ to any mock-config command to get a working mock-config from fedora's koji.

Using Koji to control tasks

List tasks:

koji list-tasks

List only tasks requested by you:

koji list-tasks --mine

requeue an already-processed task: general syntax is: koji resubmit [options] taskID

koji resubmit 3

Building a Package with the command-line tool

Instead of using the fedpkg target, you can also directly use the command_line tool, koji.

To build a package, the syntax is:

$ koji build <build target> <git URL>

For example:

Replace dist-f14 with the tag you wish to build against, e.g. dist-rawhide

$ koji build dist-f14 'git url'

The koji build command creates a build task in Koji. By default the tool will wait and print status updates until the build completes. You can override this with the --nowait option.

NOTE: For fedora koji, the git url MUST be based on pkgs.fedoraproject.org. Other arbitrary git repos cannot be used for builds.

Koji tags and packages organization

Terminology

In Koji, it is sometimes necessary to distinguish between a package in general, a specific build of a package, and the various rpm files created by a build. When precision is needed, these terms should be interpreted as follows:

• Package: The name of a source rpm. This refers to the package in general and not any particular build or subpackage. For example: kernel, glibc, etc.
• Build: A particular build of a package. This refers to the entire build: all arches and subpackages. For example: kernel-2.6.9-34.EL, glibc-2.3.4-2.19.
• RPM: A particular rpm. A specific arch and subpackage of a build. For example: kernel-2.6.9-34.EL.x86_64, kernel-devel-2.6.9-34.EL.s390, glibc-2.3.4-2.19.i686, glibc-common-2.3.4-2.19.ia64

Tags and targets

Koji organizes packages using tags. In Koji a tag is roughly a collection of packages:

• Tags support inheritance
• Each tag has its own list of valid packages (inheritable)
• Package ownership can be set per-tag (inheritable)
• When you build you specify a target rather than a tag

A build target specifies where a package should be built and how it should be tagged afterwards. This allows target names to remain fixed as tags change through releases.

Koji commands for tags

Targets

You can get a full list of build targets with the following command:

$ koji list-targets

You can see just a single target with the --name option:

$ koji list-targets --name dist-f14

Name                           Buildroot                      Destination
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
dist-f14                     dist-f14-build                 dist-f14

This tells you a build for target dist-f14 will use a buildroot with packages from the tag dist-f14-build and tag the resulting packages as dist-f14.

Watch out: You probably don't want to build against dist-rawhide. If Fedora N is the latest one out, to build to the next one, choose dist-f{N+1}.

Tags

You can get a list of tags with the following command:

$ koji list-tags

Packages

As mentioned above, each tag has its own list of packages that may be placed in the tag. To see that list for a tag, use the list-pkgs command:

$ koji list-pkgs --tag dist-f14

The first column is the name of the package, the second tells you which tag the package entry has been inherited from, and the third tells you the owner of the package.

Latest Builds

To see the latest builds for a tag, use the latest-pkg command:

$ koji latest-pkg --all dist-f14

The output gives you not only the latest builds, but which tag they have been inherited from and who built them.