Demo repo for Github Actions based builds of bootc images
For RHEL, this example uses an activation key to get access to a subscription and a service account to get access to the terms based registry images. These are set up as secrets and variables scoped to the repo.You can easily change the names of these in the repo and the workflow file to suit your own standards.
To use packages from the RHEL repositories, the builder will need to have subscription information available. This workflow will register the container, execute the build, and then unregister as a final step. You will only be using the subscription for the duration of the build. To use subscription-manager in a pipieline like this, it's easiest to use an activation key. If you don't have a subscription already, the No-cost RHEL for developers subscription is a good option.
If you aren't familiar with actionvation keys, from the docs:
An activation key is a preshared authentication token that enables authorized users to register and auto-configure systems. Running a registration command with an activation key and organization ID combination, instead of a username and password combination, increases security and facilitates automation.
Creating an activation key in the console
Create 2 secrets in the repo
Organization ID as RHT_ORGID
Activation key as RHT_ACT_KEY
Ublike UBI, the bootc base image does require an account to access since this is a full RHEL host. To log into the registry during a pipeline build or other automation, you can [create a regitry service account}(https://access.redhat.com/RegistryAuthentication#registry-service-accounts-for-shared-environments-4) in tne customer portal.
Create 1 var and 1 secret in the repo
Token username as RHT_REG_SVCUSER (has a "|" character in the name)
Password as RHT_REG_SVCPASS
GitHub runners come with roughly 14GB of free disk space. Since bootc images are complete operating systems, the job can take a lot of scrach space duing the build process.
@vrothberg rerported this issue with a different bootc based GitHub Action build:
the infamous "no space left on device" issue building my fedora-bootc-workstation image which brought me to https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/25678.
Based on that discussion and some back and forth on issue #2 in this repo, we have a version of the fix that will work with the containerized approach here. If your build starts failing due to space issues on the runner, you can mount /opt from the host read / write in the container and then remove the tool cache.
Change the options in the container specification in the job:
options: --privileged -v /opt:/host/opt:rw
Add the following step as the first step in the job (before the checkout):
- name: Free up disk space on runner
run: |
rm -rf /host/opt/hostedtoolcache
df -Th
On a test build, this removed about 8GB of tools on the host. Since this job runs in a nested UBI container which needs all of the tools made available in it, we aren't using any of the tools in the host cache.
