binaries

Holochain binaries for supported platforms

Maintainer guide

Looking after the binaries build is reasonably simple, until something breaks. The main things to look for are:

• The flake.nix that defines builds of holochain, hc, hc_run_local_services, hcterm and lair-keystore for Windows, macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) and Linux.
• The flake.nix also defines Nix bundles for each of these binaries, which depend on Holonix.
• The build.yaml that is a multi-purpose build workflow. It is used to check PRs but if run manually with a tag, it will also publish binaries to the holochain repository.
• The check.yaml workflow that can be run against a Holochain release. It pulls all the binaries and tries to run them on the supported platforms. It prints a report at the end to let you know whether each one ran successfully.

Publishing new binaries

This project is branched for each Holochain release. The main branch is for the upcoming release, the main-* branches are for released versions. Doing a bump on any branch follows the same process:

• Update Holonix first. This repository takes Holonix as an input to build bundles so that must be done first.
• Update the flake.nix to point to the new Holochain version by tag, and update Lair if necessary.
• Run nix flake update to update the lock file with the new Holochain, Lair and Holonix versions.
• Create a branch, commit and push the changes.
• Open a PR to the appropriate base branch. This will use build.yaml to verify that everything builds. This takes a while but the results are cached!
• If everything looks good, merge the PR and go to the Actions tab in GitHub. Find the Build workflow and run it manually with the tag of the new Holochain version. This will build the binaries and publish them to the associated release on theholochain repository.
• Once the binaries are published, you can run the check workflow against the same version tag to make sure everything works as expected. This is not absolutely necessary and it should probably be automated at some point, but it's a good idea to check at least on release branches.