Things you can do with Starforge:

• Build Galaxy Tool Shed dependencies
• Build Python Wheels (e.g. for wheels.galaxyproject.org)
• Rebuild Debian or Ubuntu source packages (for modifications)

There are two scripts that can be used, depending on the package recipes available:

$ ./build.sh <package>
$ python build.py <package> --version 1.0

The build.sh is the older format, and simply uses a single <package>build.sh file, like Atlas. The build.py is the newer format, and uses yaml metadata in <package>/<version>/build.yml.

The base image for Galaxy packages is Debian Squeeze. This will hopefully produce binaries usable on Galaxy's targeted platforms (at time of writing: CentOS 6+, Debian 6.0+, Ubuntu 12.04+).

To use, install Docker. Then, for Tool Shed dependencies, e.g.

$ ./build galaxy <package>
$ python build.py <package>

To build packages against a different OS, you can use the --image flag, e.g.:

$ ./build <dist>[:tag] <package>
$ python build.py <package> --image <dist>[:tag]

e.g.

$ ./build ubuntu:trusty nginx
$ python build.py nginx --image debian:squeeze

There's a separate build-all.sh which allows you to build all of the packages using their preferred build mechanism

The <version> option is optional, and defaults to the string 'default', which is useful for recipes that don't have version specific changes (E.g. bcftools 1.0 builds identically to 1.2)

Starforge can build both pure Python and C-extension Python modules into wheels for Linux under Docker and for Mac OS X under QEMU/KVM. To do this, you'll want to install Starforge (preferably in a Python virtualenv) using pip install starforge (to install from PyPI) or python setup.py install to install from the source. Docker (and QEMU) images to use are specified in starforge/config/default.yml, to modify this file, copy it to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/galaxy-starforge/config.yml ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME is, by default ~/.config). The sample file wheels/build/wheels.yml is used to determine what wheels can be built and their rules for building. To use, use the --wheels-config argument to starforge wheel or copy wheels.yml to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/galaxy-starforge/wheels.yml. Wheels can be built using starforge wheel <package>, e.g.:

$ starforge wheel pycrypto

Images used to build wheels on a variety of platforms are uploaded to the Starforge account on Docker Hub and will be pulled as necessary. Typically you will only use the base-wheel and base32-wheel, which are Debian Squeeze-based images that will usually produce wheels usable on all Galaxy-supported platforms. The exception is the case when you need to install non-standard system libraries whose versions or location will differ by Linux distribution. In this case, a "full" set of images consisting of all distributions with official images in Docker Hub can be built. This is controlled in wheels/build/wheels.yml, see psycopg2 for an example.

Due to legal reasons, an OS X image is not provided, and you are expected to provide one. Starforge then makes use of btrfs snapshots and QEMU/KVM to run the image and build wheels. An Ansible Playbook to do most of the image configuration that Starforge expects can be found in wheels/image/osx-playbook.yml.

• The build scripts themselves are targeted at whatever specific dist/release I am building them for at the moment and are not generalized to work on others.