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Gitian Building Manual

Getting and building the inputs

At this point you have two options, you can either use the automated script (found in contrib/gitian-build.py, only works in Debian/Ubuntu) or you could manually do everything by following this guide. If you are using the automated script, then run it with the --setup command. Afterwards, run it with the --build command (example: contrib/gitian-build.py -b signer 0.15.0). Otherwise ignore this.

Follow the instructions in https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/release-process.md in the bitcoin repository under 'Fetch and create inputs' to install sources which require manual intervention. Also optionally follow the next step: 'Seed the Gitian sources cache and offline git repositories' which will fetch the remaining files required for building offline.

Building Bitcoin Cash Node

To build Bitcoin Cash Node (for Linux, OS X and Windows) just follow the steps under 'perform Gitian builds' in https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/release-process.md in the bitcoin repository.

This may take some time as it will build all the dependencies needed for each descriptor. These dependencies will be cached after a successful build to avoid rebuilding them when possible.

At any time you can check the package installation and build progress with

tail -f var/install.log
tail -f var/build.log

Output from gbuild will look something like

Initialized empty Git repository in /home/gitianuser/gitian-builder/inputs/bitcoin/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 57959, done.
remote: Total 57959 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 57958
Receiving objects: 100% (57959/57959), 53.76 MiB | 484.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (41590/41590), done.
From https://gitlab.com/bitcoin-cash-node/bitcoin-cash-node.git
... (new tags, new branch etc)
--- Building for trusty amd64 ---
Stopping target if it is up
Making a new image copy
stdin: is not a tty
Starting target
Checking if target is up
Preparing build environment
Updating apt-get repository (log in var/install.log)
Installing additional packages (log in var/install.log)
Grabbing package manifest
stdin: is not a tty
Creating build script (var/build-script)
lxc-start: Connection refused - inotify event with no name (mask 32768)
Running build script (log in var/build.log)

Building an alternative repository

If you want to do a test build of a pull on GitHub it can be useful to point the Gitian builder at an alternative repository, using the same descriptors and inputs.

For example:

URL=https://gitlab.com/bitcoin-cash-node/bitcoin-cash-node.git
COMMIT=v0.18.5
./bin/gbuild --commit bitcoin=${COMMIT} --url bitcoin=${URL} ../bitcoin-cash-node/contrib/gitian-descriptors/gitian-linux.yml
./bin/gbuild --commit bitcoin=${COMMIT} --url bitcoin=${URL} ../bitcoin-cash-node/contrib/gitian-descriptors/gitian-win.yml
./bin/gbuild --commit bitcoin=${COMMIT} --url bitcoin=${URL} ../bitcoin-cash-node/contrib/gitian-descriptors/gitian-osx.yml

Building fully offline

For building fully offline including attaching signatures to unsigned builds, the detached-sigs repository and the bitcoin git repository with the desired tag must both be available locally, and then gbuild must be told where to find them. It also requires an apt-cacher-ng which is fully-populated but set to offline mode, or manually disabling gitian-builder's use of apt-get to update the VM build environment.

To configure apt-cacher-ng as an offline cacher, you will need to first populate its cache with the relevant files. You must additionally patch target-bin/bootstrap-fixup to set its apt sources to something other than plain archive.ubuntu.com: us.archive.ubuntu.com works.

So, if you use LXC:

export PATH="$PATH":${HOME}/gitian-builder/libexec
export USE_LXC=1
cd ~/gitian-builder
./libexec/make-clean-vm --suite buster --arch amd64

LXC_ARCH=amd64 LXC_SUITE=buster on-target -u root dpkg --add-architecture i386
LXC_ARCH=amd64 LXC_SUITE=buster on-target -u root apt-get update
LXC_ARCH=amd64 LXC_SUITE=buster on-target -u root \
  -e DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get --no-install-recommends -y install \
  $( sed -ne '/^packages:/,/^[^-]/ {/^- .*/{s/"//g;s/- //;p}}' ../bitcoin-cash-node/contrib/gitian-descriptors/*|sort|uniq )
LXC_ARCH=amd64 LXC_SUITE=buster on-target -u root apt-get -q -y purge grub
LXC_ARCH=amd64 LXC_SUITE=buster on-target -u root -e DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get -y dist-upgrade

And then set offline mode for apt-cacher-ng:

/etc/apt-cacher-ng/acng.conf
[...]
Offlinemode: 1
[...]

sudo service apt-cacher-ng restart

Then when building, override the remote URLs that gbuild would otherwise pull from the Gitian descriptors::

cd ~
export URL=${HOME}/bitcoin-cash-node
export COMMIT=<commmit hash or tag>

./bin/gbuild --commit bitcoin=${COMMIT} --url bitcoin=${URL} ${URL}/contrib/gitian-descriptors/gitian-win.yml