I’m setting up a virtualized development environment for webdev stuff, so that we can easily instantiate our web stuff for each developer. There are some fun DNS tricks to provide a nice interface to it, but I’ll get around to talking about those in a later post (since I haven’t built and configured Lighttpd 1.5, which I’m going to use to proxy requests). A more pressing and basic issue is package management on the jail instances.
Jails will probably be created on-demand — someone will want to do something, so they’ll click a button and boom! a jail is created and it has SSH running and all the software they need installed. Naturally, this means that building ports is not an option — everything will have to be installed via packages. Even then, fetching packages is really slow (and sometimes they’re not available). There are some other catches (“We need version X of this package because that’s what’s in production”). One solution for both is to build the packages locally, in a jail.
The next trick is getting them to serve properly. I added an extra line into that build script –
PACKAGE_SERVE_PATH=/usr/jails/bot-packages/usr/local/www/All/
find ${PACKAGE_DIR_PATH} -name '*.tbz' | xargs -I '{}' -n 1 cp '{}' ${PACKAGE_SERVE_PATH}
And have a jailed Lighttpd instance running in the bot-packages jail, serving /usr/local/www as the document root.
There’s a bitch of a catch here — you must put all your package tarballs in a directory named ‘All’. The pkg_install code is horrendous — when it processes the package dependencies, it takes the URL of the parent packages, lops off the filename and directory, then appends “All/” and the dependent package name. The logic is inconsistent with that of the behavior of pkg_add, so shit breaks.
You can fix this behavior with a patch I whipped up (but it’s easier to just work around the hacky system) –
--- usr.sbin/pkg_install/lib/url.c.orig 2009-03-26 19:56:12. +0000
+++ usr.sbin/pkg_install/lib/url.c 2009-03-26 20:41:44. +0000
@@ -57,7 +57,21 @@
* to construct a composite one out of that and the basename we were
* handed as a dependency.
*/
- if (base) {
+ if (getenv("PACKAGESITE")) {
+ if (strlcpy(fname, getenv("PACKAGESITE"), sizeof(fname))
+ >= sizeof(fname)) {
+ return NULL;
+ }
+ if (strlcat(fname, spec, sizeof(fname))
+ >= sizeof(fname)) {
+ return NULL;
+ }
+ if (strlcat(fname, ".tbz", sizeof(fname))
+ >= sizeof(fname)) {
+ return NULL;
+ }
+ }
+ else if (base) {
strcpy(fname, base);
/*
* Advance back two slashes to get to the root of the package
Anyway, once you’ve either got that patch applied to your base source (ugh) or have all your package tarballs served from a directory named “All/”, you can easily install them in the jails by setting the PACKAGESITE environment variable to the base URI of the package directory before running pkg_add -r -
root@test> setenv PACKAGESITE http://10.0.0.4/All/
root@test> pkg_add -r lighttpd-1.4.22
Fetching http://10.0.0.4/All/lighttpd-1.4.22.tbz... Done.
Fetching http://10.0.0.4/All/pcre-7.8.tbz... Done.
You can probably integrate this into ezjail’s flavor system, but I have to write an interface to manage the jail instances anyway, so I’ll probably just hack the package installation process into that.
Someone needs to rewrite pkg_install. The code is PIG DISGUSTING!
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