renConstruct

renconstruct is no longer under active development. Focus has instead shifted to the new iteration of this project, renkit. It builds off of the lessons learned from renconstruct and aims to be a more robust and feature-rich solution. renconstruct will slowly be phased out in favor of renkit, but will remain available for the foreseeable future, though no further updates are planned.

A utility script to automatically build Ren'Py applications for multiple platforms.

renConstruct can build distributions for Windows, Linux, macOS and Android, including extra processing steps pre- and post-build. By default it supports notarization for macOS distributions, a memory limit increase for Windows distributions (using LARGEADDRESSAWARE) and cleanup of temporary build artifacts. In addition, a patch task is available which enables pre-build patching of Python Ren'Py source files.

Custom pre- and post-build steps can easily be added.

Installation

renConstruct can be installed via pip:

$ pip install renconstruct

Please note that renConstruct requires Python 3 and will not provide backwards compatibility for Python 2 for the foreseeable future.

Usage

renConstruct operates based on the following process flow:

• Ensure dependencies are installed
• Validate configuration file
• Install specific version of Ren'Py if necessary
• Run the pre-build stage of all active tasks
• Build the Android distribution if enabled
• Build the macOS and Windows/Linux distributions if enabled
• Run the post-build stage of all active tasks

In the default configuration, the following tasks are executed at the respective build stage:

• pre-build:
  • None
• post-build:
  • set_extended_memory_limit
  • clean

Configuration

renConstruct requires a configuration file to be supplied containing the information required to complete the build process for the various platforms. An empty template is provided in this repository under the name config.empty.yml

It consists of the following sections:

tasks

• path: An optional path to a directory containing Python files with custom tasks
• set_extended_memory_limit: A value of true or false determining whether to run this task or not
• notarize: A value of true or false determining whether to run this task or not
• clean: A value of true or false determining whether to run this task or not
• patch: A value of true or false determining whether to run this task or not

build

• pc: A value of true or false determining whether to build the Windows/Linux distribution or not
• mac: A value of true or false determining whether to build the macOS distribution or not
• android: A value of true or false determining whether to build the Android distribution or not

renutil

• version: The version of Ren'Py to use while building the distributions
• registry: A path where renutil data is stored. Mostly useful for CI environments

notarize

• apple_id: The e-Mail address belonging to the Apple ID you want to use for signing applications.
• password: An app-specific password generated through the management portal of your Apple ID.
• identity: The identity associated with your Developer Certificate which can be found in Keychain Access under the category "My Certificates". It starts with Developer ID Application:, however it suffices to provide the 10-character code in the title of the certificate.
• bundle: The internal name for your app. This is typically the reverse domain notation of your website plus your application name, i.e. com.example.mygame.
• altool_extra: An optional string that will be passed on to all altool runs in all commands. Useful for selecting an organization when your Apple ID belongs to multiple, for example. Typically you will not have to touch this and you can leave it empty.
• sign_cert: A base64-encoded p12 certificate that should be used for signing. This is optional if the certificate already exists in the keychain of the build system.
• sign_cert_pwd: The password which was used to protect the sign_cert. Only required when sign_cert is given.

Default Tasks

renConstruct ships with several built-in tasks that enable project-independent functionality.

Clean

This task runs as the last task in the post-build stage. Its purpose is to remove unnecessary artifacts and temporary build data. It achieves this by running renutil clean, which will remove all temporary build artifacts from the Ren'Py instance used to build the project. In addition it removes non-universal APK artifacts from the output folder.

Given that the universal APK's are only a few Megabytes larger and more widely compatible, the author opines that shipping the universal versions is preferable in all cases.

Notarize

This task runs in the post-build stage and utilizes the renotize utility to automatically notarize the macOS build of the project, if it was generated. The process is entirely automatic, though it may take a few minutes depending on the size of the game and the load on Apple's notarization servers.

Set Extended Memory Limit (Deprecated)

This task runs in the post-build stage and operates on the Windows build of the project, if it was generated. Specifically, it modifies the executable file by setting the LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag in the header of the file, which enables the final build to access 4GB of RAM on Windows, instead of the typical 2GB when running in regular 32-Bit mode.

Given that Ren'Py 7.4+ now supports 64-Bit operation for all major desktop operating systems, including Windows, this task is now deprecated and only retained for legacy operation. If you're building with Ren'Py 7.4+ you do not need this task.

Patch

This task runs early in the pre-build stage and is capable of applying patch files (code diffs) to Python files of the Ren'Py instance that will be used to build the project. This allows for automatic application of game-specific patches before building, enabling customization at the engine level.

It is important to note that renConstruct does not build or rebuild Ren'Py after these patches are applied. As such it is only possible to patch runtime files, which effectively boils down to the pure-Python parts of Ren'Py. Patching the compiled parts is not supported and actively discouraged.

The task works by looking at a directory of patch files (specified in the configuration file) and applying them to equally-named files in the directory of the Ren'Py instance. For this to work, the structure of the patch directory must exactly mirror that of the paths to the actual file to patch, relative to the instance directory.

For example, if you wanted to patch the file renpy/display/presplash.py you would generated a patch file and name it presplash.py. After that you would put it into the directory patches/renpy/display/presplash.py. Patch files are expected to match the diff-match-patch format for diffs. These types of files can be easily generated using the diffusor command-line utility.

renConstruct will automatically figure out the actual file to apply it to, as well as create a backup of the original file. If any part of the patching process fails, all changes are rolled back. It is also guaranteed that a file will only ever be patched once. Even if a file has been patched before and the patch file has changed, the new patch will be reliably applied to the original, unmodified file and the currently modified version will be replaced by the new version.

Overwrite Keystore

This task runs early in the pre-build stage and is capable of overwriting the android.keystore file in Ren'Py's Android packager with a custom one. This is useful because you typically want to sign all your APK's with the same key, as otherwise Google will prevent you from updating your game, since the signature will have changed.

This task works by reading the keystore file either from the environment variable RC_KEYSTORE or from a config option like this:

overwrite_keystore:
  keystore: "<my keystore>"

Since the keystore is a binary file, it can't just be pasted into a text document. To get around this issue, this task expects the keystore to be base64-encoded and for that representation to be stored either in the environment variable or in the config file, depending on which method you choose.

The value in the config file takes precedence if both options are given. If the task is active but neither option is given, it will error out.

Custom Tasks

Custom tasks can easily be added using the path value. It should point to a directory containing Python files. Each file can contain one or more task, which will be picked up by renConstruct.

A task is an object that looks like this:

class DoSomethingTask():

    PRIORITY = -100

    AFFECTED_FILES = ["rapt/hash.txt"]

    def __init__(self, name, config):
        self.name = name
        self.config = config

    @staticmethod
    def validate_config(config):
        pass

    def pre_build(self):
        pass

    def post_build(self):
        pass

The name of the class must end with Task for it to be picked up by renConstruct. Every custom task will automatically receive a setting in the config file based on the class name split on uppercase letters, converted to lowercase and joined by underscores. The example task above would receive the config variable do_something.

A task can have a custom section in the config file. To support this, each task class can have an optional static method validate_config, which is passed the subsection of the config object pertaining to that task. It can then validate this config object in any way it sees fit, raising an Exception when an issue occurs. The parsed config subsection is then integrated into the full config object, which is then passed back to the task upon initialization.

A task can have two methods pre_build and post_build (either or both is possible). They will be called with the validated config object at the specified build stage. At that point they can do whatever they want. As an example, a custom task could be built to automatically optimize image assets in the game directory before every build.

Each task also has a PRIORITY class attribute which has a default value of 0 and determines the order in which to run the tasks. A higher priority means that task will be executed earlier than others with a lower value. Both positive and negative values are possible.

As an example, the built-in clean task runs at PRIORITY = -1000 to ensure it's always the last task to be run.

Optionally, a task can specify a list of AFFECTED_FILES. This is a list of paths to files relative to the SDK directory which this task modifies. Any files listed here will be backed up by renconstruct upon its first run and will be restored to their original state on every subsequent run, ensuring that the task always has the same base to work off of. This is largely meant to combat state corruption, for example by running the patch task and disabling it in a subsequent run.

Example

renconstruct -c config.yml -i path/to/my-game/ -o out/

Using renConstruct with Gitlab CI

A common use case for headless building of distributions is Continuous Integration. Find below an example of a GitLab CI configuration file which should work for most projects.

# Recent experience shows that using "python:latest" can cause issues
# because its definition may vary per runner. Always specify the exact
# version you intend to use to avoid issues.
image: python:3.8

variables:
    PIP_CACHE_DIR: "$CI_PROJECT_DIR/.cache/pip"

cache:
  paths:
    - .cache/pip
    - venv/

before_script:
  # Downloads renconstruct through pip
  - pip install renconstruct

run:
  script:
    # Runs renconstruct in the project directory, saving the build outputs to a new folder called "artifacts"
    # inside the project directory and utilises the file config.yml to specify reconstruct options.
    - renconstruct -d -i $CI_PROJECT_DIR -o $CI_PROJECT_DIR/artifacts -c $CI_PROJECT_DIR/config.yml

  artifacts:
    paths:
     # Saves the artifacts located in the "artifacts" folder to GitLab
      - $CI_PROJECT_DIR/artifacts/**.*

Command Line Interface

Usage: renconstruct.py [OPTIONS]

  A utility script to automatically build Ren'Py applications for multiple
  platforms.

Options:
  -i, --input TEXT   The path to the Ren'Py project to build  [required]
  -o, --output TEXT  The directory to output build artifacts to  [required]
  -c, --config TEXT  The configuration file for this run  [required]
  -d, --debug        If given, shows debug information if
  --help             Show this message and exit.

Disclaimer

renConstruct is a hobby project and not in any way affiliated with Ren'Py. This means that there is no way I can guarantee that it will work at all, or continue to work once it does.