build propellor binary

Hi,

I'd like to run propellor differently:

create a static binary from config.hs.
upload it to the target machine (which can be ARM, do not have GHC, et al).
run it.

Propellor would build the binary if I ask it to with propellor --build; not static yet, but I think I can figure it out.

How would I run a propellor binary on the local host, without trying to connect anywhere? I would be grateful if you could suggest an approach.

Thank you!

RSS

comment 1

There is a pending task about this, see spin without remote compilation.

Comment by Nicolas.Schodet — Sun Apr 14 20:25:12 2019

Remove comment

comment 2

Yeah, if someone wants to check out origin/precompiled and test if it works, it may well be in a mergeable state. However, it doesn't deal with cross compilation to arm or anything like that.

Anyway, once you've built a propellor binary, all it takes to run it on some remote host is "sudo ./propellor" (perhaps passing the hostname to run for if the current hostname is not one that propellor recognises).

But it expects to be run in a clone of the git repository, I don't know what will fail if it's run without that clone. Probably best to clone the git repo to /usr/local/propellor and run it in there.

And if any of your properties rely on private data it won't be able to access that and they'll fail.

Comment by joey — Tue Apr 16 18:26:11 2019

Remove comment

comment 3

Thanks for your responses! I wasn't aware there was prior work done on this.

origin/precompiled did not build for me. But when I merged master into it, and patching around a trivial merge conflict, I got this:

[ 58 of 182] Compiling Propellor.Property ( src/Propellor/Property.hs, dist/build/Propellor/Property.o )

src/Propellor/Property.hs:364:13: error:
    * Could not deduce (Monoid (Property (MetaTypes t)))
        arising from a use of `mempty'
      from the context: SingI t
        bound by the type signature for:
                   doNothing :: forall k (t :: k). SingI t => Property (MetaTypes t)
        at src/Propellor/Property.hs:363:1-46
    * In the expression: mempty
      In an equation for `doNothing': doNothing = mempty
    |
364 | doNothing = mempty
    |             ^^^^^^

Unfortunately, I am not versed enough in Haskell to understand the error.

$ ghc --version
The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System, version 8.4.4

Here is my merged fork (based on 38b4da93 and origin/precompiled at 7d550c75): if you can make it: github.com/motiejus/propellor, and tell me how to fix the above error, I would try to test it functionally further.