#CI: what .build.yml does and why

The manifest is deliberately short on prose. builds.sr.ht stores a submitted manifest in a varchar(16384), so a manifest that grows past 16 KiB cannot be submitted at all — the failure is at submission time and reads like nothing in particular. Rationale therefore lives here, and the manifest carries pointers.

The pipeline is one linear job on alpine/edge: install the cache helper, assemble the shared SCSS, decide a version, restore caches, start a Postgres, test, package with abuild, publish the apk to repo.bigb.es/alpine/v3.22/bigbes, save caches.

It is triggered by a push to the sourcehut side. A push to sourcecraft cannot reach builds.sr.ht; the gitsync mirror is what puts the commit on git.srht.bigb.es, and that push is what submits the job. So the mirror is on the critical path for the package repository, not merely an offsite copy.

#packages

sassc and minify build the stylesheet; curl installs cacher; rclone publishes the apk; abuild, go and git are the build itself.

postgresql and postgresql-client are for the test suite, not for the package. The apk declares no runtime dependency on Postgres — the daemon talks to whatever connection-string names, which in production is another host.

There is no compiler toolchain beyond go: this package is built CGO_ENABLED=0 with -tags gms_pure_go (see the APKBUILD and the Makefile), which is what keeps libicu and gozstd off the builder entirely. A default cgo build of this tree fails on missing ICU headers and always has.

#secrets

Three, all account-level and shared with the sibling services:

They are file secrets. Listing them is what turns publish and the cache tasks on; a manual submission that asks for no secrets still runs the interesting part of the pipeline and stops at cacher_init, which is the right place to notice.

apk-ci-s3 is referenced by name and the other two by UUID, which is only because that is how they were written in the donor manifests; both forms work.

#environment

CORE_VER must track the deployment's SRHT_CORE_VER, and BOOTSTRAP_REV is the Bootstrap 4 submodule commit core.sr.ht pins at that tag. The two being out of step means this service renders against different partials than the rest of the instance, which shows up as a page that is subtly the wrong shape and as nothing at all in any log. Bump them together.

#cacher

cacher is an S3-backed cache helper, installed from pages.sr.ht.

It is two tasks and not one because install.sh appends its PATH export to ~/.buildenv, and ~/.buildenv is sourced by the next task's preamble — a single task would install it and then not find it.

It is install.sh and not a raw curl of the binary, for two reasons that both end in the same place. The installer verifies the download against the published checksums.txt; and the raw curl it replaced had no -f, so an S3 404 or a proxy error page was written to ~/.local/bin/cacher, chmod +x-ed, and only noticed as a baffling "not found"/"exec format error" one task later.

#scss

sassc needs the shared sourcehut partials, and no apk ships them: they are core.sr.ht's own scss/ plus the Bootstrap 4 tree it pins as a submodule. The task clones both and drops them in /usr/share/sourcehut/scss, cached under a key made of the two pins, so an outage at git.sr.ht or GitHub cannot fail a build that changed nothing.

The --exec block runs only on a cache miss, and cacher seeds the cache from the result afterwards. It sees exported variables only, which is why the cache key is spelled inline in the cacher invocation rather than computed inside the block.

--exec and not the if ! cacher dir download …; then … fi this task used to be. The if form conflates two different failures into one branch: a genuine S3 error and an ordinary cache miss both mean "clone it again", so an S3 outage was silently absorbed into a slower build and never reported. And it made the seed upload the last command of the branch, i.e. fatal — an S3 hiccup while storing a cache would fail a build whose SCSS had assembled perfectly. Under --exec the seeding is best-effort by construction and the download's own errors stay distinguishable from a miss.

#keygen

abuild-keygen -a -n -i -q makes a throwaway package signing key. -i is not optional: without it the key is generated but not installed into /etc/apk/keys, and abuild later fails to index its own output with an UNTRUSTED signature error, after having built the package perfectly well.

The key is per-build and thrown away with the VM. That is fine because nothing verifies these signatures — the apk index on repo.bigb.es is signed by apk-mirror on phoebe, which indexes this repo with --allow-untrusted precisely because of this.

#version

One git describe decides the apk's pkgver:

• a tag — v0.2.0 becomes 0.2.0;
• a tag plus commits since it — v0.2.0-7-gabc1234 becomes 0.2.0_git7. Alpine's version grammar does not accept the raw describe output, and _git sorts after the release in Alpine's comparison, which is what makes an untagged master build look newer than the tag it follows;
• no tag at all — 0.0.<commit count>, which is where this repository stands today and is the scheme of the bench/spec/compare siblings.

Tags are in allow-refs for exactly this reason: pushing v0.2.0 is what produces the 0.2.0 apk.

#Why it is exported and not sed-ed

PKGVER reaches abuild through ~/.buildenv, and APKBUILD reads pkgver="${PKGVER:-0.0.0}". It used to sed the literal in the tracked APKBUILD instead. Do not tidy it back.

Go records a VCS stamp in every binary it builds inside a repository, and it decides the vcs.modified half of that stamp from git status --porcelain. Rewriting a tracked file in the checkout sets it, and it stays set for the whole abuild run — so every binary in the apk records itself as <sha>-dirty. Measured on go1.26.5.

The same flag is why .gitignore lists /src/, /pkg/ and /tmp/: git status --porcelain counts untracked files too, and abuild — which works in this checkout, since APKBUILD sets builddir="$startdir" and has no tarball to unpack — creates all three inside it. /tmp/ is the one that is easy to miss: abuild defaults tmpdir to $startdir/tmp and exports GOTMPDIR to it, and /usr/share/abuild/default.conf exports MAKEFLAGS=-j$(nproc), under which make all-bin's three go builds run at once and each sees the others' work directories.

The task ends with git status --porcelain because this is the last moment the tree is provably clean, and the print costs nothing.

#cache_restore

The Go module cache and build cache are keyed by the hash of go.sum, so a build that changed no dependency reuses both. That matters more here than in the siblings: the dolthub/dolt dependency tree dominates compile time and only moves when go.sum does. --optional turns a miss into a cold build rather than a failure — it replaced a || true, which also swallowed a genuine S3 error and an unreadable credential.

abuild redirects GOCACHE into its own $tmpdir (and an upstream typo slaves GOMODCACHE to GOCACHE's value rather than its own), so exports here cannot stick. APKBUILD's build() re-pins both to these home locations, which is what makes the tarballs saved below the same trees restored here.

#The half-restored module cache

The repair block is not defensive padding. A partially restored module cache is the normal failure mode of this arrangement — an interrupted upload, a truncated object, a key written while a build was still running — and what it produces is a compile error deep in a dependency, which reads exactly like a bug in the code under test.

So: make the tree writable (the module cache is mode 555 and rm -rf cannot remove it otherwise), ask go mod verify whether what came back is intact, and throw the whole thing away if it is not. Then go mod download and verify for real, and let that failure be fatal.

Do not soften the final go mod verify to || true. A build that proceeds with a module cache it could not verify is a build whose result means nothing.

#go mod download and the word all

It is go mod download, not go mod download all, and the difference is not a matter of thoroughness.

all is the package pattern meaning the whole module graph reachable from this one — dependencies' test dependencies included, which no build of this module ever compiles. Resolving it makes the toolchain append the missing hashes to go.sum, and go.sum is a tracked file. A tracked file modified in the checkout before go build runs is exactly the -dirty stamp the version task above exists to avoid: the task written to protect the version would have been the thing that broke it.

Measured on this tree with go1.26.5: go mod download all took go.sum from 671 lines to 1097 — 426 hashes added — and left the tree modified. Plain go mod download left go.sum byte-identical, and go mod verify answered "all modules verified" after it. This repository's dolthub/dolt graph is the largest in the family, so the gap here is the widest; it is not zero anywhere.

The same failure was seen for real on a sibling: bench build #359 failed its version gate with M go.sum as the only thing in the way.

#postgres

A real Postgres in the VM, initialised from scratch each build.

Until this task existed, not one of this repository's 28 test files had ever run on the builder — the manifest went straight from cache_restore to abuild, and options="!check" in the APKBUILD meant abuild did not run them either. Every apk this pipeline has published was built from code CI had compiled and never executed.

What the database needs to be there for, measured on this tree: db/ has 10 tests and 9 of them gate themselves on DOLTSRHT_TEST_PG (db/db_test.go's newTestStore), so without a DSN the entire persistence layer — repository and key CRUD, the access-control queries, the schema — is skipped and the build is green regardless. The other packages do not need it and do not skip without it.

The suites do not share state: each creates a scratch schema doltsrht_test_<random>, applies schema.sql into it, routes its pool there with lib/pq's options=-c search_path=…, and drops it afterwards. So one database serves the whole suite, and no CREATE DATABASE privilege is needed past the one createdb above.

fsync=off, full_page_writes=off and synchronous_commit=off are safe here and only here: the database lives for the length of one build and its durability guarantees protect nothing. -k /run/postgresql is why the task creates that directory — Alpine's package does not — and createuser -s "$(id -un)" is what lets the build user connect without a password, which is what keeps the DSN in ~/.buildenv free of a credential.

#remoteapi/integration_test.go does not want Docker

That file's startPostgres prefers DOLTSRHT_TEST_PG and falls back to docker run postgres:16-alpine only when the variable is empty, so with the DSN exported it never looks for a Docker daemon the builder does not have.

It is moot in any case: the file is behind //go:build integration, so go test ./... does not even compile it. Running it would additionally need the dolt CLI, which it skips on. storage/spike_test.go is behind //go:build spike for the same kind of reason. Neither tag is set here, deliberately.

#test

make vet and make test, not bare go commands: the Makefile is where -tags gms_pure_go and CGO_ENABLED=0 are named, and a second copy of those two here is a second copy to forget. The tags are not optional — a go vet or go test without gms_pure_go pulls go-icu-regex in and wants ICU headers the builder has never had.

The guard on an empty DOLTSRHT_TEST_PG exists because the failure it prevents is silent. If the postgres task did not export the DSN — or if someone reorders the two tasks — every database suite skips with a friendly message, go test exits 0, and the build is green over untested code. An explicit refusal is the difference between a broken pipeline and a lying one. It is also what makes options="!check" in the APKBUILD an honest claim rather than a licence: that option says "the suites ran in CI", and this guard is the only thing that keeps it true.

There is no gofmt gate, unlike the tokens sibling. web/beads.go and four test files are gofmt-dirty on master, so a gate would be red on arrival; fixing them is a separate change and not one to smuggle into a CI wave.

The task runs before build, so the tree it leaves behind is the tree abuild packages; the closing git status --porcelain is where anything the suites wrote into the checkout would show.

#build

REPODEST=$HOME/packages abuild -d builds and stages the apk.

-d disables abuild's dependency check: the makedepends are already installed by the manifest's packages: list, and abuild has no way to know that.

builddir="$startdir" in APKBUILD means abuild packages this checkout in place rather than unpacking a tarball. There is no tarball to unpack — the package is built from the commit under test, which has not been released anywhere yet.

#build() and package()

build() compiles with GOFLAGS="-trimpath -modcacherw" and then asserts with make check-css; package() calls make install-files, which does not build.

That split is the point. abuild runs package() in a fresh abuild process under fakeroot which re-sources the APKBUILD and never calls build(), so nothing build() exported survives — the cache pins above included. A make install there recompiled all three binaries from a cold module cache, without -trimpath, and it was that copy that went into the apk, while the checks build() had run were left behind with the copy nobody shipped.

-modcacherw matters beyond tidiness: without it the module cache is left read-only, and the cache tarball cache_save makes from it cannot be unpacked on the next build (mkdir into 0555 directories fails).

make check-css replaced a bare ls static/main.min.*.css. install-share copies stylesheets under 2>/dev/null || true, so a make css that produced nothing would stage an unstyled service and fail nothing; and web/router.go resolves main.min.*.css by glob and takes the first match, so two hashed stylesheets are as wrong as none and quieter. check-css counts.

PREFIX="$pkgdir/usr" and not DESTDIR: this Makefile's install rules write to $(BINDIR)/$(SHAREDIR) directly and genuinely do not honour DESTDIR.

#publish

The [ ! -r ~/.apk-ci.env ] gate is the honest answer to a build that was handed no secrets, not a fallback. A manual submission without secrets still runs every earlier task and still leaves a built, signed apk in $HOME/packages; saying so and exiting 0 is more useful than a red build about a credential nobody meant to supply. On a push the secret is there and this publishes.

set +x before sourcing ~/.apk-ci.env and set -x after. Every task runs under set -x, so without this the S3 access key and secret are echoed into a build log that is world-readable.

The upload is rclone copyto per file — copy only, never delete, never sync. A sync would mirror local absence onto the bucket, and the bucket holds every previously published version of every service on the instance. Old versions stay so a pinned deployment can always be rebuilt.

apk-mirror on phoebe re-indexes within 15 minutes; nothing here waits for it.

#cache_save

After publish, deliberately: a cache upload that fails must not strand an apk that was built and signed successfully but never shipped.

Fatal on purpose, though — an upload failure here means the next build pays for a cold cache, and that is worth knowing about rather than hiding behind || true.

There is no cacher exists "$KEY" || guard in front of the uploads any more. cacher dir upload without --force already skips a key that is present, so the guard bought nothing and cost a second round trip whose failure mode — a transient error on the exists probe — was an unnecessary re-upload.

#The hook subpackage

dolt.sr.ht-hook carries dolt-git-hook alone. It is installed into the git.sr.ht container as its post-update-script, not into the dolt one, and pulling the full service package in there would drag doltsrht and its whole dependency closure along.

Nothing in this wave changed it, and that is deliberate: the git.sr.ht container consumes it at a pinned version. But it is built from the same APKBUILD — the hook() function only amoves a file the main package already staged — so it is versioned in lockstep with dolt.sr.ht and inherits everything above.

Two consequences worth stating out loud. Its pkgver now comes from the exported PKGVER like the parent's, so the first tagged build renames it from dolt.sr.ht-hook-0.0.<n> to dolt.sr.ht-hook-<tag> and a deployment pinning the old name must be bumped along with it. And dolt-git-hook is one of the three binaries build() now compiles with -trimpath, so the file the subpackage ships changes bytes on the next build even where nothing else did.

#What is not here

• No coverage upload. The sibling services POST their profile to cover.sr.ht at the end of the pipeline. Adding it here needs a token secret and a repository on cover.
• No artifacts. There is nothing to download: the apk goes to S3, and its name changes every commit, which artifacts: cannot express (it has no globbing).
• No matrix. One architecture, one image.
• No gofmt gate. See test.
• No integration or spike build tag. See remoteapi/integration_test.go does not want Docker.