python-aptly

Aptly REST API client and useful tooling

Publisher

Publisher is tooling for easier maintenance of complex repository management workflows.

This is how workflow can look like and what publisher can do for you:

Features

• Create or update publish from latest snapshots
  • it takes configuration in yaml format which defines what to publish and how
  • expected snapshot format is <name>-<timestamp>
• Promote publish
  • use source publish snapshots to create or update another publish (eg. testing -> stable)
• Cleanup unused snapshots
• Purge publishes and repositories
• Restore and dump publishes
• Supports Python 3 (recommended) and Python 2

Create or update publish

First create configuration file where you define Aptly repositories, mirrors and target distributions for publishing.

mirror:
  # Ubuntu upstream repository
  trusty-main:
    # Base for our main component
    component: main
    distributions:
      - nightly/trusty
  # Mirrored 3rd party repository
  aptly:
    # Merge into main component
    component: main
    distributions:
      - nightly/trusty

repo:
  # Some repository with custom software
  cloudlab:
    # Publish as component cloudlab
    component: cloudlab
    # Use swift storage named myswift for publish storage
    storage: swift:myswift
    distributions:
      # We want to publish our packages (that can't break anything for
      # sure) immediately to both nightly and testing repositories
      - nightly/trusty
      - testing/trusty

Configuration above will create two publishes from latest snapshots of defined repositories and mirrors:

• nightly/trusty with component cloudlab and main
  • creates snapshot _main-<timestamp> by merging snapshots aptly-<timestamp> and trusty-main-<timestamp>)
• testing/trusty with component cloudlab, made of repository cloudlab

It expects that snapshots are already created (by mirror syncing script or by CI when new package is built) so it does following:

• find latest snapshot (by creation date) for each defined mirror and repository
  • snapshots are recognized by name (eg. cloudlab-<timestamp>, trusty-main-<timestamp>)
• create new snapshot by merging snapshots with same publish component
  • eg. create _main-<timestamp> from latest trusty-main-<timestamp> and aptly-<timestamp> snapshots
  • merged snapshots are prefixed by _ to avoid collisions with other snapshots
  • first it checks if merged snapshots already exists and if so, it will skip creation of duplicated snapshot. So it's tries to be fully idempotent.
• create or update publish or publishes as defined in configuration

It can be executed like this:

aptly-publisher -c config.yaml -v --url http://localhost:8080 publish

Promote publish

Let's assume you have following prefixes and workflow:

• nightly
  • created by publish action when there's new snapshot or synced mirror
  • packages are always up to date
• testing
  • freezed repository for testing and stabilization
• stable
  • well tested package versions
  • well controlled update process

There can be more publishes under prefix, eg. nightly/trusty, nightly/vivid

Then you need to switch published snapshots from one publish to another one.

aptly-publisher -v --url http://localhost:8080  \
--source nightly/trusty --target testing/trusty \
publish

You can also specify list of components. When you have separate components for your packages (eg. cloudlab) and security (mirror of trusty security repository), you may need to release them faster.

aptly-publisher -v --url http://localhost:8080  \
--source nightly/trusty --target testing/trusty \
--components cloudlab security -- publish

Finally you are also able to promote selected packages, eg.

aptly-publisher -v --url http://localhost:8080  \
--source nightly/trusty --target testing/trusty \
--packages python-aptly aptly -- publish

Show differences between publishes

You can see differences between publishes with following command:

aptly-publisher -v --url http://localhost:8080  \
--source nightly/trusty --target testing/trusty \
promote --diff

Example output can look like this:

Cleanup unused snapshots

When you are creating snapshots regularly, you need to delete old ones that are not used by any publish. It's wise to call such action every time when publish is updated (eg. nightly).

aptly-publisher -v --url http://localhost:8080 cleanup

Purge unused packages from repo and publishes

When you are uploading a lot version of the same package, you may want to get rid of old packages version in your snapshots. Be careful, the option --hard will remove the packages from your repos.

aptly-publisher -v --url http://localhost:8080 --component extra --hard purge

Installation

You can install directly using from local checkout or from pip:

python3 setup.py install
pip3 install python-aptly

Or better build Debian package with eg.:

dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us

Read more

For usage informations, see aptly-publisher --help or generate and view man page.

PYTHONPATH=. help2man -n "aptly-publisher - tool for easy creation of Aptly multi component publishes" --version-string=$(grep version setup.py|cut -d '"' -f 2) "python3 aptly/publisher/__main__.py" | sed -e s,__main__.py,aptly-publisher,g -e s,__MAIN__.PY,APTLY-PUBLISHER,g > aptly-publisher.1
man aptly-publisher.1

Also see doc/examples directory.

For examples of jenkins jobs, have a look at tcpcloud/jenkins-jobs repository.

Known issues

• determine source snapshots correctly (#271)
• cleanup merged snapshots before cleaning up source ones
  • before that it's needed to run cleanup action multiple times to get all unused snapshots cleaned