7.5.1. Environment Preparation

7.5.1.1. Getting Started

Warning

Use a non-root user for building SIMP!

7.5.1.1.1. Ensure Sufficient Entropy

The SIMP build generates various keys and does quite a bit of package signing. As such, your system must be able to keep its entropy pool full at all times. If you check /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail and it shows a number below 1024, then you should either make sure that rngd is running and pointed to a hardware source (preferred) or install and use haveged.

sudo yum install haveged
sudo systemctl start haveged
sudo systemctl enable haveged

7.5.1.1.2. Setup a Container Management System

There are a lot of different methods for running containers (we like podman) so you will need to find one that works for your operating system.

While most of our development occurs on SIMP-managed systems, we have had luck using WSL in Windows and Docker in OS X.

Examples in the documentation will use podman and buildah.

7.5.1.1.3. Ensure Sufficient Space

Building the ISO takes quite a bit of space so make sure you have at least 30G of free space available.

If you use a container, you need to make sure that wherever you are hosting your container has enough space available.

If your default location does not have enough space, you may need to change your graphroot in $HOME/.config/containers/storage.conf.

7.5.1.1.4. Install Puppet Bolt

The latest build system uses puppetlabs/bolt to spin up pulp containers for repository mirroring.

This was done to work with modular repositories in EL8+.

7.5.1.1.5. Setup Your Build Container

SIMP needs to be built using the exact same distribution that the ISO targets.

7.5.1.1.5.1. Use an Existing Image

For the fastest start, use a published image if one is available that matches your system.

podman pull simpproject/simp_build_centos8

7.5.1.1.5.2. Build a Fresh Container

If a matching image is not available (or updates are available that have yet to be published) then use the build-related Dockerfiles in the simp/simp-core project under the build/Dockerfiles subdirectory.

The following provides an example of how to build and start the image:

git clone https://github.com/simp/simp-core
cd simp-core/build/Dockerfiles
buildah bud --layers -f SIMP_EL8_Build.dockerfile -t simp_build_centos8
podman run -id --name simp_build_centos8 simp_build_centos8
podman exec -it simp_build_centos8 bash
su - build_user
cd simp-core
git tag
git checkout <tag of simp-core that you wish to build>