Nests

Self Hosted Mini Repositories for Soar

• Nests are self hosted repositories that build & release packages on their own Account/Org/Repository/Registry. Think of them as homebrew's tap, but easier & better.

• For Developers, Nests are an easy way to distribute their applications easily & seamlessly to the target system or any *Unix based distro

• For Users, Nests are an easy (& quicker) way to get their favourite applications as soon as new releases are made without waiting for any package manager (including us) to package it first.

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Developers

Workflow

• This will publish (mirror) your release on ghcr & add a new release tag soar-nest to your repository

• The soar-nest release tag contains JSON metadata which soar uses to start ingesting your repository as a Nest.

1. Write and add an .SBUILD to your Project. You can ask us for help.

2. Add something like this to your release pipeline or as another workflow

name: 🧰🛠️ Build Soar Package 📦📀

##Optional:
# Setup minisign & add the private key as secret: MINISIGN_KEY [${{ secrets.MINISIGN_KEY }}]
# Setup a Read-Only Underprivileged Github Token as secret: RO_GHTOKEN [${{ secrets.RO_GHTOKEN }}]
# Setup a Read-Only Underprivileged GitLab Token as secret: RO_GLTOKEN [${{ secrets.RO_GLTOKEN }}]

#These permissions are needed by main CI
permissions:
  attestations: write #Needed for Build Provenance & Attestations
  contents: write #Needed to create Release
  id-token: write #Needed for Build Provenance & Attestations
  packages: write #Needed to push to ghcr

#Assuming you just published a new release & the SBUILD doesn't build from source                 
on:
  #push:
  workflow_dispatch:
  release:
    types: [published]

jobs:

#Assuming you are targeting a stable release
  stable-release:
    uses: pkgforge/soarpkgs/.github/workflows/matrix_builds.yaml@main
    with:
      host: "ALL" #Otherwise aarch64-Linux OR x86_64-Linux
      sbuild-url: "https://github.com/${{ github.repository }}/raw/main/.github/SBUILD/latest.yaml" #Must always be a raw URL
      ghcr-url: "ghcr.io/${{ github.repository }}/stable" #Package will be pushed under this path
      pkg-family: "YOUR-PKG-PRIMARY-NAME" #Needed so soar can cross reference with other repos/nests
      debug: false #If set to true, will run everything with set -x
      logs: true #Will Attach the entire Logs + File as Workflow Artifact
      rebuild: true #Will rebuild even if ghcr tag already exists

1. Check for the soar-nest release tag (It is marked as a Pre-Release)

2. Update your README to include a one-liner

soar nest add "https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/YOUR-ORG"

• All values must be lowercase : https://github.com/oras-project/oras/discussions/930 , the workflow will forcefully change all values to match this.

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Branding

• There's hardcoded stuff related to pkgforge, like filepath & some links.

• The filename/paths should be harmless and are present only in CI, not the final artifact

• However the api-urls, can't be removed as it is needed & used by soar-core. Fallbacks are automatically used in case our api-urls ever die, so this is also harmless.

• Finally, there's some branding in the logfile, To disable banners in logfiles, set banner:false

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Security

By default, if you use our official workflows, you are pulling in code from our repos & then executing them on your repo with some over privileged perms. This is fine if you trust us not to do anything bad.

However, if you want to be extra careful, these mitagtions will help reduce any potential impact in case of incidents:

1. Always use the workflow on github actions with github''s own JIT, so they would be generated & expired automatically.
2. Additionally, rather than using pkgforge/soarpkgs/.github/workflows/matrix_builds.yaml@main , audit our code, and then hardcode it to a particular commit hash pkgforge/soarpkgs/.github/workflows/matrix_builds.yaml@${SHA}

3. Additionally, separate your project's official project repo and soar's nest repo into two different repositories, so the token would have access to only soar's nest repo, not to your whole project

4. Additionally, read our code, and then rewrite it by yourself, on your own repo & run it on your own infra

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Quirks

• Nests won't work on forked repos because github needs it to be a real (detached) repository in order to push packages associated with that repo to ghcr.

• Setup time for a build job can be as high as 10 minutes, this is because the runner needs to be able to handle any & all scenarios. This is intentional, as developers can use any build tool or even docker/podman without having to specify install deps in the SBUILD itself. However, if the sbuild only needs curl/wget, the runner will still go through the whole setup phase. Currently there's no solution for this problem, we thank you for your understanding & welcome any ideas over at: soarpkgs/discussions

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Users