While it is possible to build Rook directly on your host, we highly discourage it. Rook has many dependencies (mostly through Ceph) and it might be hard to keep up with the different versions across distros. Instead we recommend that you use the build process that runs inside a Docker container. It results in a consistent build, test and release environment.

Requirements

A capable machine (2+ cores, 8+ GB of memory) with Docker installed locally:

MacOS: you can use Docker for Mac or your own docker-machine
Linux: any distro with a recent version of Docker would work

We do not currently support building on a remote docker host.

Update the git submodules

Rook has many git submodules, and before you can build Rook you need to initialize them:

git submodule sync --recursive
git submodule update --recursive --init

Using the Build Container

To run a command inside the container:

> build/run <command>

This will run <command> from inside the container where all tools and dependencies have been installed and configured. The current directory is set to the source directory which is bind mounted (or rsync'd on some platforms) inside the container.

The first run of build/run will pull the container (which can take a while).

If you don't pass a command you get an interactive shell inside the container.

> build/run
rook@moby:~/go/src/github.com/rook/rook$

Building Rook

Now you can build in the container normally, like so:

build/run make -j4

This will build just the binaries and copy them to the applicable subfolder of ./bin.

See Makefile for more build options.

Updating the Build container

To modify the build container change the Dockerfile and/or associated scripts. Also bump the version in build/container/version. We require a version bump for any change in order to use the correct version of the container across releases and branches. To create a new build of the container run:

cd build/container
make

If all looks good you can publish it by calling make publish. Note that you need quay.io credentials to push a new build.

Here's a rough sketch of the proposed approach somewhat influenced by how CoreOS is released.

Resetting the Container

To reset the build container and it's persistent volumes, you can run the below command. You shouldn't have to do this often unless something is broken or stale with your build container:

build/reset