Using a private cmake-re deployment instance: TIPI_ENDPOINT & RBE_service

cmake-re can be run on a private cloud deployment or on-prem. All users of that deployment need to specify TIPI_ENDPOINT & RBE_service in their environment, so that the cmake-re and tipi CLI access the correct deployment.

The syntax for these environment variables are :

• TIPI_ENDPOINT=https://<deployment-address> ( without ending / )
• RBE_service=<cluster-address>:<port>

Command line authentication

In non-interactive situation (a CI/CD job, other automated usages) it might be required to provide the tipi CLI with credentials to access private repositories or make use of the tipi subscription.

tipi vault authentication

• TIPI_ACCESS_TOKEN and TIPI_REFRESH_TOKEN are JWT tokens enabling tipi to get access to the tipi subscription.
• TIPI_VAULT_PASSPHRASE has to be supplied in situations where the user's Vault must be decrypted (ex. accessing private repositories)

Distributed build authentication

• RBE_tls_client_auth_key : User specific mTLS authentication private key to RBE_service
• RBE_tls_client_auth_cert : User specific mTLS authentication public certificate to RBE_service

Customizing tools distribution TIPI_DISTRO_JSON

Tipi uses a JSON file which contains the required tools used by tipi to build projects (like cmake or make). These tools are automatically downloaded and installed on demand by tipi at run-time before running projects build.

The contents of the file can be changed as per your needs for maximum usage flexibility setting the environment variable TIPI_DISTRO_JSON.

The environment variable may point to:

• an absolute or relative file path
• an HTTP(s) URL

The original JSON file can be found at https://github.com/tipi-build/distro/blob/master/distro.json

Below some examples of what you can set as TIPI_DISTRO_JSON:

export TIPI_DISTRO_JSON="~/projects/tipi/distro.json"
- or -
export TIPI_DISTRO_JSON="/home/user/projects/tipi/distro.json"
- or -
export TIPI_DISTRO_JSON="https://company.com/tipi/distro.json"

If TIPI_DISTRO_JSON is a HTTP(s) URL, tipi will download the file and check file integrity against the value in the environment variable TIPI_DISTRO_JSON_SHA1

Customizing tools distribution TIPI_DISTRO_JSON_SHA1

When a customized TIPI_DISTRO_JSON is downloaded via HTTP(s) tipi performs an integrity check by checking the sha1sum of the downloaded file against the value of TIPI_DISTRO_JSON_SHA1.

For example:

export TIPI_DISTRO_JSON="https://company/tipi/distro.json"
export TIPI_DISTRO_JSON_SHA1="4eb777d088ea949709e9ea97bbc8c389a63856e2"

Distro installation mode TIPI_DISTRO_MODE

By default tipi only installs the subset of the build tools required to build remotely using the tipi.build cloud. For local builds you can install force the installation of the required tools locally.

For example:

export TIPI_DISTRO_MODE="all" # "full" install - takes ~7gb in TIPI_HOME_DIR 
 - or -
export TIPI_DISTRO_MODE="default" # "light" install for remote builds

Tipi container build local registry port TIPI_LOCAL_REGISTRY_PORT

In order to provide a consistent cache keying for containerized (both local and remote) and distributed tipi and cmake-re generate an environment description that contains a hard reference to the container that will be used to execute the build.

This process requires that locally built images (read: a Dockerfile is provided as part of the environment specification and there is no matching and valid image available on the registry) be pushed to a registry to generate that hard reference data if the docker runtime of the host system is not using an OCI compliant internal storage for the images (read: most Docker installations on Linux at time of writing).

To automate this process tipi and cmake-re will start an ephemeral local container registry and push to that as needed to generate the required data.

By default the ephemeral local container registry will be hosted on 127.0.0.1:43113

The port can be changed by setting the environment variable TIPI_LOCAL_REGISTRY_PORT to any integer value in the range [1024 - 65535].

Passing additional parameters to the environment build command TIPI_CONTAINER_BUILD_ADDITIONAL_PARAMETERS

Additional parameters (docker buildx arguments) can be passed to the environment builder by setting the environment variable TIPI_CONTAINER_BUILD_ADDITIONAL_PARAMETERS before running a build that will determine that a container image needs rebuilding.

This can be useful if one needs to set a build tag or image label in a CI setup that is making environment images available to developers:

export TIPI_CONTAINER_BUILD_ADDITIONAL_PARAMETERS="--label org.myself.note=hello --tag localref123:latest"

After running the build of the container image the image build configuration will contain the org.myself.note label and the image will be available as localref123:latest on the host.

⚠️ Note: changes to this parameters will not be taken into account during the computation of cache keys or the like nor will they trigger a re-build of an otherwise unchanged environment.