CKAN Packaging Scripts

These scripts are used to build Debian packages (deb files) for CKAN releases.

Note: This version of the scripts can only package CKAN 2.9 and higher. For previous CKAN versions use the build-ckan-2.8 tag.

Overview

To create Debian packages of CKAN, install Vagrant and Ansible and run:

./ckan-package -v dev-v2.10 -i 1 -t jammy

If you omit the parameters you will be prompted for them.

CKAN 2.10 Python3 jammy, focal CKAN 2.9 Python3 jammy, focal

The following combinations of packages are no longer supported:

CKAN 2.9    Python3, Python2    focal, bionic, xenial
CKAN 2.8    Python2             focal, bionic, xenial
CKAN 2.7    Python2             focal, bionic, xenial

Keep reading for more options and to learn how it works.

How it works

This repository contains a Vagrant environment configured in a multi-machine setup.

Each machine is running one of the supported distributions that we target, currently:

• Ubuntu 20.04 64bit (focal)
• Ubuntu 22.04 64bit (jammy)

We use Ansible to provision the Vagrant machines, which results in the creation of the package. Ansible is configured via playbooks. These are a set of configurations and tasks that are run in the remote server. The file we use is package.yml and it is quite straight-forward to follow what is going on.

The actual packaging is done in the building maching by FPM, a tool that aims to make building packages quickly and easily.

To pass parameters like the CKAN version or the iteration to the Vagrant file and ultimately to Ansible we need to use env vars. To make this a little bit more convenient, the ckan-package script is included, which essentially sets up the necessary env vars and calls vagrant up or vagrant provision as appropiate.

Install and setup

1. Install Vagrant. On an Ubuntu machine:

   sudo apt-get install vagrant

   Or for an OSX machine use the installer at https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html

2. Install Ansible. If you have a virtualenv you can install it in that:

   pip install ansible

   Otherwise simply install it globally:

   sudo easy_install ansible

3. Checkout this repository in your virtualenv or elsewhere:

   git clone https://github.com/ckan/ckan-packaging.git
   cd ckan-packaging

You are now ready to build packages.

Building a package

Packages are built using the ckan-package script. Check the following for a full list of options and parameters:

./ckan-package --help

Most of the times you will want to run something like the following:

./ckan-package -v dev-v2.10 -i 1 -t jammy

Where:

• -v (version) relates to the CKAN branch or tag to build, eg master, dev-v2.10, ckan-v2.9.8
• -i (iteration) e.g. beta1 for a beta or for a proper release use a number e.g. 1
• -t (target) will build just for that version of Ubuntu

The first time that you run the build commands Vagrant will need to download the OS images from the central repository, this might take a while. After the first run, the image will be already on your machine so it won't take as much. Most of the steps in the Ansible playbook (like installing required packages) will be also skipped, so subsequent builds should be much faster.

You will see the output of the different tasks, both for Vagrant and Ansible. Once the process is finished, you should see a summary of the tasks. All tasks should be ok or changed.

The packages will be created in the same directory.

TODO: upload the packages to S3 (http://packaging.ckan.org/build/).