Phoenix builds on various Linux distros with Vagrant

Vagrant (https://www.vagrantup.com/) is a tool that enables creating and using automated, relatively lightweight virtual environments. Vagrant and the Vagrant community provide several base images that are essentially simplistic bare-bones installs of various operating systems, that can be thought of as a bare canvas ready for provisioning with the needs of whatever applications they will be used for.

For Phoenix, this means that we can automate the creation and provisioning of virtual Linux machines with all the packages installed that are needed for building Phoenix. The subfodlers located in this folder contain the Vagrant configurations and a bootstrap script for all of the Linux distros that we currently support.

Setup

The following steps should be followed to set up a computer to be a Vagrant host:

1. Install VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

2. Install vagrant: https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html

3. Install the vagrant-vbguest plugin to keep the VirtualBox Guest Additions package installed and up to date. See: https://github.com/dotless-de/vagrant-vbguest and run:

   vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
   

Building

The Vagrant VMs are provisioned to contain everything they need to build Phoenix packages, except for two things: the source code and a build script to do all the work. To make this a little simpler, the VMs are also configured to share the {PhoenixRoot}/dist folder, and the {PhoenixRoot}/vagrant/scripts folder so they can access those two things as well.

To perform a build there must be a Phoenix source tarball located in the {PhoenixRoot}/dist folder, which can either be generated with the build.py dox etg sip sdist command, or one of the source tarballs from a release or the snapshots server can be used. With that file in place then a build for a specific distro can be done with just a few vagrant commands, for example:

cd vagrant/ubuntu-16.04-x64
vagrant up
vagrant ssh -c "scripts/build.sh ubuntu-16.04"
vagrant halt

Please note that currently this will do up to 6 complete builds, one for each supported version of Python on that distro, for both gtk2 and gtk3. Additional parameters can be passed to the build.sh script to narrow the build down to a specific Python version or port. See build.sh for details.

The wheel file(s) generated by the build will be placed in subfolders of {PhoenixRoot}/dist/linux.