Getting started

This documentation will outline what releng-tool is, how it can be used to create projects with various package definitions, with the end goal of creating release artifacts for a project.

releng-tool is made on Python. Package configurations, scripts, etc. are Python-compatible scripts, which releng-tool accepts for processing configuration files and invoking other tools on a host system. While releng-tool supports running on various host systems (e.g. Linux, OS X, Windows, etc.), this guide will primarily show examples following a Unix-styled file system.

Running releng-tool

Depending on the host and how releng-tool has been installed, this tool can be either executed using the call releng-tool (if supported) or explicitly through a Python invoke python -m releng-tool. This guide will assume the former option is available for use. If the alias command is not available on the host system, the latter call can be used instead. For example, the two commands shown below can be considered equivalent:

releng-tool --version
 (or)
python -m releng-tool --version

Overview

A project will typically be defined by a releng configuration file along with one or more packages found inside a package/ folder. This location can be referred to as the “root directory”.

Note

releng-tool supports extensionless configuration/script files (e.g. releng), as well as configuration/scripts using a .py or .releng extension. For more information, please see alternative extensions.

When invoking releng-tool, the tool will look in the current working directory for project information to process. For example, if a folder my-project had a skeleton such as:

└── my-project/
    ├── package/
    │   └── package-a/
    │       └── ...
    └── releng

The following output may be observed when running releng-tool:

$ cd my-project
$ releng-tool
extracting package-a...
patching package-a...
configuring package-a...
building package-a...
installing package-a...
generating license information...
(success) completed (0:01:30)

On a successful execution, it is most likely that the releng-tool process will have an asset (or multiple) generated into a images/ location. It is up to the developer of a releng-tool project to decide where generated files will be stored.

If a user wishes to pass the directory of a project location via command line, the argument --root-dir can be used:

releng-tool --root-dir my-project/

For a complete list of actions and other argument options provided by the tool, the --help option can be used to show this information:

releng-tool --help

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