Remote builds

Remote builds offload rock builds to the build farm hosted by Launchpad. With remote builds, you can assemble multiple rocks simultaneously and build for all supported architectures.

Remote builds are launched by running rockcraft remote-build. Rockcraft will upload the Git repository on the current working directory to Launchpad on your behalf, under your account. Next, it will trigger builds for the Rockcraft project present on the root of the repository and continuously monitor the status of the new builds.

Once all builds are done (either through a successful build or a failure), the rock files will be downloaded to the current directory, together with the build logs.

Prerequisites

In order to perform remote builds, the following conditions must be met:

  • You must have a Launchpad account, as the remote builds are performed on Launchpad.

  • The Rockcraft project must be version-controlled by Git. This is because Rockcraft uses a Git-based workflow to upload the project to Launchpad.

  • The repository hosting the Rockcraft project must not be a shallow clone, because Git does not support pushing shallow clones.

Limitations

The following is a list of the current limitations of the remote build feature, which are planned to be addressed in the future:

  • The prospective rock must be open source and public, because the remote builds triggered by Rockcraft are publicly available.

  • All architectures defined in the project’s platforms key are built – there’s currently no way to restrict the set of platforms to build remotely.