Packaging Crystal Software for openSUSE

Prerequisites§

You will need the following:

osc and obs-service-download_files
your editor of choice e.g. emacs, helix
tar
familiarity of how to use https://build.opensuse.org/. See https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Packaging for guides. Fedora has one too, see https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines.
crystal

Check with zypper if osc is installed.

Tip: Use the cnf command to check which package osc comes from.
cnf osc

Recipe§

The following subtopics explain how to package crystal software step-by-step. Adjust accordingly based on your setup.

Create a new package§

You can do it at https://build.opensuse.org/ but if you prefer the commandline, you can do for example

osc mkpac blahaj
cd blahaj

In this tutorial, we will try to package BLAHAJ using the shards project and dependency manager for Crystal and tar.

Package without a dependency§

Write the specfile§

Using your preferred editor, create a file named blahaj.spec. The following prelude should be enough for the specfile:

Name: blahaj
Version: 2.1.0
License: BSD-2-Clause
Summary: Gay sharks at your local terminal
Url: https://github.com/GeopJr/BLAHAJ
Source0: https://github.com/GeopJr/BLAHAJ/archive/refs/tags/v2.1.0.tar.gz#/%{name}-%{version}.tar.gz
Source1: vendor.tar.zst
BuildRequires: crystal
BuildRequires: shards
BuildRequires: make

How do I have shards and crystal?

You can branch packages from my home project at Open Build Service - https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/home:uncomfyhalomacro. Or even just add an repository image of that project. I have shards and crystal there. The latter can also be found at https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/devel:languages:crystal/crystal if you want that too.

For the sake of simplicity, we will assume that we are going to use crystal, shards, and make at your home project in Open Build Service.

Add the following sections: description, prep, build, install, files and changelog section.

Name: blahaj
Version: 2.1.0
Release: 0
License: BSD-2-Clause
Summary: Colorize your terminal with gay sharks
Url: https://github.com/GeopJr/BLAHAJ
Source0: https://github.com/GeopJr/BLAHAJ/archive/refs/tags/v2.1.0.tar.gz#/%{name}-%{version}.tar.gz
BuildRequires: crystal
BuildRequires: shards
BuildRequires: make

%description
Apart from a cute cuddly shark plushie from IKEA, BLÅHAJ is a lolcat-like CLI tool
that colorizes your input, shows flags and prints colorful sharks!

It has a wide variety of flags/colors to choose from and many options from flag size
to whether to colorize by line, word or character.

%prep

%build

%install

%files

%changelog

At the root of your project package e.g. home:yourusername/blahaj, run osc service localrun download_files. You will get a file called blahaj-2.1.0.tar.gz. Extracting the file gets us the directory BLAHAJ-2.1.0/. This means that in our %prep section, we need to add %setup -qa1 -n BLAHAJ-%{version}. This is to redirect the rpm macros that building should be at RPM_BUILDDIR/BLAHAJ-2.1.0/ since by default, it is RPM_BUILDDIR/nameofpackage-version/ based on the Name: and Version: RPM specfile prelude.

Building and Installing the package§

The following sections should be easy here since make as build dependency has convenient macros such as %make_build and %make_install.

Name: blahaj
Version: 2.1.0
Release: 0
Summary: Colorize your terminal with gay sharks
License: BSD-2-Clause
Url: https://github.com/GeopJr/BLAHAJ
Source0: https://github.com/GeopJr/BLAHAJ/archive/refs/tags/v2.1.0.tar.gz#/%{name}-%{version}.tar.gz
BuildRequires: crystal
BuildRequires: shards
BuildRequires: make

%description
Apart from a cute cuddly shark plushie from IKEA, BLÅHAJ is a lolcat-like CLI tool
that colorizes your input, shows flags and prints colorful sharks!

It has a wide variety of flags/colors to choose from and many options from flag size
to whether to colorize by line, word or character.

%prep
%setup -q -n BLAHAJ-%{version}

%build
%make_build

%install
%make_install

%files
%{_bindir}/blahaj
%doc README.md CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
%license LICENSE

%changelog

As for %files, you can just do a "best guess" or "best observation" approach. Here, we based it from the Makefile and for documentation and license, those are self-explanatory.

Changelog can be left as is since we are not Fedora 😘. We use blahaj.changes for that generated with osc vc. It creates a temporary file you can edit from like below

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Mon Jul 31 12:34:07 UTC 2023 - Your Name <youremail@example.com>

- Initial spec for blahaj 2.1.0

Add the files§

Add the files by running the command

osc add blahaj.spec blahaj-2.1.0.tar.gz blahaj.changes

And then push it to your home project at Open Build Service with osc ci, which allows you to check the diff and see what was changed based from the blahaj.changes file.

Check if it builds correctly§

Now check your new blahaj package at your home project. If it fails, investigate what went wrong! Check mine at https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:uncomfyhalomacro/blahaj.

NOTE: It seems at the time of writing, I missed some dependencies or optional dependencies for crystal! Anyway, I am confident it will build this correctly after that's fixed.

Package With dependencies§

This is where tar and shards comes in. An example of this is shards itself. See https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:uncomfyhalomacro/shards.

What I did here is at the root of the project e.g. home:yourname/shards, I extracted the shards source tarball, tar xvf shards-0.17.3.tar.gz. Changed directory to the extracted directory, shards-0.17.3/ and then ran shards check and shards install. You will get a new directory called lib/. This is where you vendor your dependencies like how Rust and Go do.

To vendor it, it's simple. Just run

tar --zstd -cvf vendor.tar.zst lib/

Copy vendor.tar.zst to the root of the project package folder. Add it to one of the sources of your project and adjust your %setup with flags -qa1 which a1 means extract Source1: vendor.tar.zst to the root of RPM_BUILDDIR/shards-0.17.3 including the root folder of the archive lib/.

This will create a new directory called lib/, and contains other crystal packages that are dependencies of that project.

Then I just used crystal to build shards as seen from the build section and do a manual install with install command at the install section.

Other possibilities§

You can also remove make or shards as well if you prefer just using crystal on the build section.