peterodding.com / code / lua / buildbot

Lua build bot - A build bot for popular Lua projects

• GitHub: Watched by 4 people, most recent update was Sun Oct 16 06:06:18 UTC 2011

Lots of Lua projects (including Lua itself and LuaJIT) only release source code archives and expect users to build the project. On UNIX this is not really a problem but on Windows this can pose a significant hurdle for potential users. My Lua build bot is an attempt to solve this problem. While developing this build bot I took the following points into consideration:

• I’ve had bad experiences with cross compilation so I prefer to build Windows binaries on Windows
• I don’t actually have any Windows machines and don’t feel like setting one up just for this build bot
• I want to be able to run the build bot from a cron job so it can automatically build all projects once a week

# Downloads

The following packages have been built by the Lua build bot:

# Implementations of Lua

# Lua modules

# Status

The following stuff has not yet been implemented but is on the to-do list:

• Make the build bot test the binaries using a test suite of some sort; if everything is going to be automated I have to know that the binaries I’m publishing actually work
• Deploy the build bot and virtual machine to one of my servers and run the build bot from a daily cron job?
• Use LuaRocks to build Lua modules: currently the build bot uses custom batch scripts to build Lua modules, but of course a generic solution is preferable!
  • While adding support for the LuaSocket module I was curious enough to try if luarocks install luasocket would work in my environment but it doesn’t; msbuild complains that the project files are incompatible
• Support for Mac binaries? This requires someone to run the build bot periodically on their Mac, because I don’t have access to any Mac machines

# How it works

Right now the build bot is meant to be run on my machine because it works in a very specific way, however I’m planning to make it more generally useful (and with a bit of persistence it should already be possible for other folks to get it running). At the moment I run the build bot as follows:

• I start the build bot script from a terminal on my Ubuntu Linux installation
• The build bot starts a headless virtual machine running Windows using VirtualBox
  • The virtual machine has been specifically setup for the build bot (see below)
  • When the virtual machine boots it automatically launches the build bot
• When the build bot is executed on Windows it performs the following steps for each project:
  • Find latest available release from homepage
  • Download archive (if not already downloaded)
  • Unpack and build project
  • Copy files to be released (binaries & headers)
• When the build bot was executed automatically on Windows, it will shut the virtual machine down

As I mentioned above the plan is to run the build bot from a cron job on a server, this is still a work in progress.

# Dependencies in the VM

In order to run the build bot on Windows I installed the following software in the virtual machine:

• Windows XP SP3
• The latest Windows Platform SDK (7.1)
• Lua For Windows (v5.1.4-45)
• My Lua/APR binding (0.20)
• gunzip, tar, wget and unzip from UnxUtils

I’m not publishing the virtual machine image because it was registered with my serial number and of course it’s quite big (more than 2 GB). However it’s not hard to create the virtual machine, it just takes a bit of time. Apart from installing the software mentioned above, there are only two things to configure in the virtual machine:

• Inside the virtual machine I’ve mounted a shared folder as a network drive, this enables the two build bots to easily exchange files
• After creating the network drive I added buildbot.cmd to my Start → Programs → Startup menu so that the build bot runs automatically after the VM is started and shuts down the VM after building all projects

# Contact

If you have questions, bug reports, suggestions, etc. the author can be contacted at peter@peterodding.com. The latest version is available at http://peterodding.com/code/lua/buildbot and http://github.com/xolox/lua-buildbot.

# License

This software is licensed under the MIT license.
© 2011 Peter Odding <peter@peterodding.com>.

# Disclaimers

• This license only applies to the build bot itself — I don’t have any affiliation with the projects supported by the build bot, I’m just a happy user
• Should the original authors have objections against this build bot, let me know and I will remove support for the project in question
• I don’t give any guarantees as to the published binaries. They’re generated in a dedicated machine so it’s very unlikely that a virus could sneak in, but you never know until you’ve scanned the binaries yourself…

Last updated Sun Oct 16 06:06:18 UTC 2011.