Quick Gitian building with docker

Setup instructions for a Gitian build of Monero using Docker.

Gitian supports other container mechanisms too but if you have a Debian or Ubuntu-based host the steps can be greatly simplified.

Preparing the Gitian builder host

The procedure here will create a docker container for build preparation, as well as for actually running the builds. The only items you must install on your own host are docker and apt-cacher-ng. With docker installed, you should also give yourself permission to use docker by adding yourself to the docker group.

sudo apt-get install docker.io apt-cacher-ng
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
su $USER

The final su command is needed to start a new shell with your new group membership, since the usermod command doesn't affect any existing sessions.

You'll also need to clone the monero repository and navigate to the contrib/gitian directory:

git clone https://github.com/monero-project/monero.git
cd monero/contrib/gitian

Other User Preparation

The final step will be to gpg sign the results of your build and upload them to GitHub. Before you can do that, you'll need

a GitHub account. If your GitHub account name is different from your local account name, you must set your GitHub account name for the script to use:

export GH_USER=<github account name>

PGP keys - if you don't have one already, you can use gpg --quick-gen-key to generate it.
a fork of the gitian.sigs repo on your GitHub account. Please follow the directions there for uploading your key first.

Note: Please ensure your gpg public key is available to check signatures by adding it to the gitian.sigs/gitian-pubkeys/ directory in a pull request.

Building the Binaries

The dockrun.sh script will do everything to build the binaries. Just specify the version to build as its only argument, e.g.

VERSION=v0.18.3.2
./dockrun.sh $VERSION

The build should run to completion with no errors, and will display the SHA256 checksums of the resulting binaries. You'll be prompted to check if the sums look good, and if so then the results will be signed, and the signatures will be pushed to GitHub.

Note: In order to publish the signed assertions via this script, you need to have your SSH key uploaded to GitHub beforehand. See https://docs.github.com/articles/generating-an-ssh-key/ for more info.

You can also look in the gitian.sigs repo and / or getmonero.org release checksums to see if others got the same checksum for the same version tag. If there is ever a mismatch -- STOP! Something is wrong. Contact others on IRC / GitHub to figure out what is going on.

Other Options

This script just runs the gitian-build.py inside a container named gitrun. You can set other options for that script by setting the OPT variable when running dockrun.sh e.g.

# Run build processes with 8 threads
OPT="-j 8" ./dockrun.sh $VERSION

Post-build

You can examine the build and install logs by running a shell in the container, e.g.

# Tail running logs
docker exec -it gitrun /bin/bash
tail -F builder/var/install.log
tail -F builder/var/build.log

# Inspect logs, in format install-<OS>.log and build-<OS>.log
docker exec -it gitrun /bin/bash
more builder/var/install-linux.log
more builder/var/build-linux.log

You can find the compiled archives inside of the container at the following directory:

docker exec -it gitrun /bin/bash
ls -la out/$VERSION/

To copy the compiled archives to the local host out of the Docker container, you can run the following:

mkdir out
docker cp gitrun:/home/ubuntu/out/$VERSION out

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