build-aur-packages

Github Action that builds AUR packages and provides the built packages as package repository in the github workspace. From there, other actions can use the package repository to install packages or upload the repository to some share or ...

See here for a real world example.

Usage: Use this in a job that allows to run dockers (e.g. linux machine) like this:

jobs:
  build_repository:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Build Packages
      uses: kopp/build-aur-packages@v1
      with:
        packages: >
          azure-cli
          kwallet-git
          micronucleus-git
        missing_pacman_dependencies: >
          libusb-compat

This example will build packages

          azure-cli
          kwallet-git
          micronucleus-git

Since the package micronucleus-git has the dependencies not properly declared, you can force pacman to install the missing dependency by passing it to missing_pacman_dependencies. If a dependency from AUR is missing, you can pass this to missing_aur_dependencies.

The resulting repository information will be copied to the github workspace.

Maintenance

Update GPG key

It will be necessary to update the gpg key stored in this repository. To do so, run

gpg --export --armor 6BC26A17B9B7018A > gpg_key_6BC26A17B9B7018A.gpg.asc

Update tag

The tags should only change if the API (i.e. the yaml description parameter for the action) changes. Hence when the Dockerfile needs to be adapted because some package needs a fix, the tag(s) should be re-set to the commit fixing the issue. To achieve that, use (e.g. for v1):

git push origin :refs/tags/v1
git tag -fa v1
git push origin master --tags

Development

To build a package and create the corresponding repository files, build the docker image

docker build -t builder .

then run it, passing the packages as environment variables. The names of the variables are derived from the action.yaml.

mkdir workspace
docker run --rm -it \
    -v $(pwd)/workspace:/workspace \
    -e "GITHUB_WORKSPACE=/workspace" -e "INPUT_PACKAGES=go-do" \
    builder

How this works

This repository contains/provides a github action. This is defined in action.yaml, in particular this defines the inputs and that this action uses docker by building and running Dockerfile.

The Docker image we build is an Arch Linux image, with some tweaks to pacman and related tools so that they run on github workers. It will build aurutils and use it to create a new package database aurci2. This local database is directly added as local repository to pacman (via pacman.conf).

After this is done, the docker image is ready. When the docker container is executed, it runs update_repository.sh. This will pick up all inputs from the github action (which are passed as environmen variables) INPUT_<name>. It will then install dependencies via pacman and use aur sync to fetch and build aur packages. They are added to the aurci2 local database.

Finally, all files (in particular including the database files) are copied to the $GITHUB_WORKSPACE, where other actions can pick them up, e.g. as in this example where they are published as github release.