Bis is a wrapper for bash meant to help automate compilation and installation of software in a consistent way while remaining flexible and simple. It was originally written to replace use of rpmbuild in an environment that was not interested in actually creating package files. The is that bis would implement some of the needed features without its more distribution-oriented restrictions.

The basic usage of bis is bis build-script.bis where build-script.bis is a filename in the form of alternating (name, version) pairs delimited with dashes. Bis will:

• Export several build-related bash functions, documented below.
• Split the filename into tokens on hyphens (-)
• Set $NAME to the first token and $VERSION to the second token. NAME{2,3} and VERSION{2,3} are set for additional tokens.
• Invoke the script as a bash function with all of tokens passed as arguments ($@) so that the NAME and VERSION variables can be fixed manually if necessary.

Bis expects $INSTALL_ROOT and $SOURCES to be defined prior to script invocation. This means the tool invoking the script (eg Jenkins) can set INSTALL_ROOT based on whether it is a production build or not.

A simple bis script might look like this:

Filename: hello-0.0.1-generic.bis

SUMMARY="Hello, World"

#Set important variables based on environment and filename (including $INSTALL_DIR)
# also creates and cds to $WORKSPACE at $HOME/.bis/workspace/hello-0.0.1-generic
bis-init

# Clean and unpack source into workspace
# Determins $UNPACKPATH and cds to it
# $HOME/.bis/workspace/hello-0.0.1-generic/hello-0.0.1
bis-unpack

./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR
make
make install

# Write a bis-install.txt and append to bis-install.log
bis-finish

• INSTALL_ROOT - Root directory for all installations. Should be set in environment. ($HOME/opt)
• SOURCES - Path to source repository. Should be set in environment. ($HOME/src)
• WORKSPACE_ROOT - Path to build workspace directory. Source tarballs will be unpacked to this directory. ($HOME/.bis/workspace)

• FULLNAME - Full name of the file, without the .bis extension. Set by bis before invoking the script. (python-2.7.14-gcc-6.2.0)
• WORKSPACE - Set by bis to $WORKSPACE_ROOT/$FULLNAME ($HOME/.bis/workspace/python-2.7.14-gcc-6.2.0)
• NAME - Name of the application. Set by bis to the first token in filename. (python)
• VERSION - Version of the application, the second token in the filename (2.7.14)
• NAME2 - Name of compiler, etc. Third filename token (gcc)
• VERSION2 - Version of compiler, etc. Fourth filename token. (6.2.0)

• SOURCE_FILENAME - The base filename of the source tarball. Set by bis-init to $NAME-$VERSION.$extension, where extension is determined by searching $SOURCES for supported archive formats. (python-2.7.14.tgz)
• SOURCE - The full path to the source tarball. Set to $SOURCES/$SOURCE_FILENAME. ($HOME/src/python-2.7.14.tgz)
• INSTALL_DIR - Install prefix for the application. Set by bis-init to $INSTALL_ROOT/$NAME/$VERSION ($HOME/opt/python/2.7.14)
• UNPACKPATH - Inspects the $SOURCE archive to see if it extracts to a single directory. If the archive has multiple directories or files in its root, UNPACKPATH is set to WORKSPACE. ($HOME/.bis/workspace/python-2.7.14-gcc-6.2.0/Python-2.7.14)

• BUIlD_OWNER - used by bis-finish when writing bis-install.log
• DESCRIPTION - used by bis-finish when writing bis-install.txt
• SUMMARY - used by bis-finish when writing bis-install.txt

bis-description <<<EOF
Description of the application
goes here.
EOF

Wrapper function to set $DESCRIPTION using HEREDOC syntax without messy with cat or pipes. Still kind of ugly, but it's just metadata.

bis-init [no-cd-to-workspace]

Call this first, unless you need to override any of the values it sets. After setting environment variables, bis-init changes the working directory to $WORKSPACE, unless no-cd-to-workspace is passed.

Checks to see if important variables are defined, and that the source package exists.

bis-unpack

Removes $UNPACKPATH if it exists, then decompresses and untars $SOURCE to $WORKSPACE.

When finished, changes working directory to $UNPACKPATH.

bis-clean [just-make-clean]

Does rm -rf $UNPACKPATH, unless just-make-clean is passed, in which case it cds to $UNPACKPATH and runs make clean.

bis-show-vars

Echo all variables with values to standard output.

bis-finish

Writes an info file and logfile to the $INSTALL_DIR.

bis-determine-unpackdir <archive-file>

Attempts to determine the directory the given archive file extracts to. If multiple files or directories are found in the root of the archive, this retuns nothing.

bis-set-unpack-path

Sets $UNPACKPATH to $WORKSPACE/$(bis-determine-unpackdir $SOURCE).