# Hacking on osbuild-composer

*osbuild-composer* cannot be run from the source tree, but has to be installed

onto a system. We recommend doing this by building rpms, with:

    make rpm

This will build rpms from the latest git HEAD (remember to commit changes), for

the current operating system, with a version that contains the commit hash. The

packages end up in `./rpmbuild/RPMS/$arch`.

RPMS are easiest to deal with when they're in a dnf repository. To turn this

directory into a dnf repository and serve it on localhost:8000, run:

    createrepo_c ./rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64

    python3 -m http.server --directory ./rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64 8000

To start a ephemeral virtual machine using this repository, run:

    tools/deploy-qemu IMAGE tools/deploy/test

`IMAGE` has to be a path to an cloud-init-enabled image matching the host

operating system, because that's what the packages where built for above.

Note that the Fedora/RHEL cloud images might be too small for some tests

to pass. Run `qemu-img resize IMAGE 10G` to grow them, cloud-init's growpart

module will grow the root partition automatically during boot. 

The second argument points to a directory from which cloud-init user-data is

generated (see `tools/gen-user-data` for details). The one given above tries to

mimick what is run on *osbuild-composer*'s continuous integration

infrastructure, i.e., installing `osbuild-composer-tests` and starting the

service.

The virtual machine uses qemu's [user networking][1], forwarding port 22 to

the host's 2222 and 443 to 4430. You can log into the running machine with

    ssh admin@localhost -p 2222

The password is `foobar`. Stopping the machine loses all data.

For a quick compile and debug cycle, we recommend iterating code using thorough

unit tests before going through the full workflow described above.

[1]: https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/Networking#User_Networking_.28SLIRP.29