Getting Started

# acquire "vcf-validator" source code as an example; it needs both c++11 and boost
git clone https://github.com/EBIvariation/vcf-validator
# download, unpack and launch centos5dev
wget https://github.com/lh3/proot-wrapper/releases/download/v2/centos5dev-v2.tar.bz2
tar -jxf centos5dev-v2.tar.bz2
centos5dev/run  # this enters the centos5dev "virtual machine"
# compile vcf-validator
mkdir -p vcf-validator/build
cd vcf-validator/build
cmake .. && make -j2
# exit the "virtual machine"
exit  # or press "control-D"

About centos5dev

Centos5dev is a small package (46MB) that helps to create portable precompiled binaries for 64-bit Linux. It comes with fundamental libraries from CentOS5 and recent development tools such as cmake-3.3, gcc-4.9 and boost-1.57. It uses PRoot to mimic a virtual machine entirely in the user space (i.e. no root permission is ever required), such that we can compile tools as if we are working on a CentOS 5 machine. As tools compiled on CentOS 5 are easily portable to other Linux distributions, tools compiled with centos5dev are also portable.

Centos5dev has the following tools or libraries installed, all statically linked: gcc-4.9.2, cmake-3.3.2, boost-1.57, zlib-1.2.8, sqlite-3.8.11.1, sparsehash-2.0.2, LibreSSL-2.1.3, libssh2-1.4.3, curl-7.40.0 and busybox-1.23.2.

About PRoot

PRoot is a powerful chroot emulator without the root permission. PRoot/chroot takes an arbitrary directory as if it is a new root filesystem, isolated from the rest of filesystems. It effectively provides a way to launch a complex pipeline, or even an entire Linux distribution, with dependencies fully contained in a single directory. PRoot is very general. Centos5dev is just one of the many possible applications.