Building from source v23

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Warning

This option is intended for developers and advanced users. Only software built and tested by EDB is supported by EDB. Please refer to Self-Managed Supported Open Source Software.

TPA can build Postgres and other required components from source and deploy a cluster with exactly the same configuration as with the default packaged installation. This makes it possible to deploy repeatedly from source to quickly test changes in a realistic, fully-configured cluster that reproduces every aspect of a particular setup, regardless of architecture or platform.

You can even combine packaged installations of certain components with source builds of others. For example, you can install Postgres from packages and compile pglogical and PGD from source, but package dependencies would prevent installing pglogical from source and PGD from packages.

Source builds are meant for use in development, testing, and for support operations.

Quickstart

Spin up a cluster with 2ndQPostgres, pglogical3, and bdr all built from stable branches:

$ tpaexec configure ~/clusters/speedy -a BDR-Always-ON          \
    --layout bronze                                             \
    --harp-consensus-protocol etcd                              \
    --install-from-source                                       \
      2ndqpostgres:2QREL_13_STABLE_dev                          \
      pglogical3:REL3_7_STABLE                                  \
      bdr3:REL3_7_STABLE

As above, but set up a cluster that builds 2ndQPostgres source code from the official git repository and uses the given local work trees to build pglogical and BDR. This feature is specific to Docker:

$ tpaexec configure ~/clusters/speedy                           \
    --architecture BDR-Always-ON --layout bronze                \
    --harp-consensus-protocol etcd                              \
    --platform docker                                           \
    --install-from-source 2ndqpostgres:2QREL_13_STABLE_dev      \
      pglogical3 bdr3                                           \
    --local-source-directories                                  \
      pglogical3:~/src/pglogical bdr3:~/src/bdr

After deploying your cluster, you can use tpaexec deploy … --skip-tags build-clean on subsequent runs to reuse build directories. (Otherwise the build directory is emptied before starting the build.)

Read on for a detailed explanation of how to build Postgres, pglogical, BDR, and other components with custom locations and build parameters.

Configuration

There are two aspects to configuring source builds.

If you just want a cluster running a particular combination of sources, run tpaexec configure to generate a configuration with sensible defaults to download, compile, and install the components you select. You can build Postgres or Postgres Extended, pglogical, and BDR, and specify branch names to build from, as shown in the examples above.

The underlying mechanism is capable of much more than the command-line options allow. By editing config.yml, you can clone different source repositories, change the build location, specify different configure or build parameters, redefine the build commands entirely, and so on. You can, therefore, build things other than Postgres, pglogical, and BDR.

The available options are documented here:

Local source directories

You can use TPA to provision Docker containers that build Postgres and/or extensions from your local source directories instead of from a Git repository.

Suppose you're using --install-from-source to declare what you want to build:

$ tpaexec configure ~/clusters/speedy                           \
    --architecture BDR-Always-ON --layout bronze                \
    --harp-consensus-protocol etcd                              \
    --platform docker                                           \
    --install-from-source 2ndqpostgres:2QREL_13_STABLE_dev      \
      pglogical3:REL3_7_STABLE bdr3:REL3_7_STABLE               \
      …

By default, this will clone the known repositories for Postgres Extended, pglogical3, and bdr3, check out the given branches, and build them. But you can add --local-source-directories to specify that you want the sources to be taken directly from your host machine instead:

$ tpaexec configure ~/clusters/speedy                           \
    --architecture BDR-Always-ON --layout bronze                \
    --harp-consensus-protocol etcd                              \
    --platform docker                                           \
    --install-from-source 2ndqpostgres:2QREL_13_STABLE_dev      \
      pglogical3 bdr3                                           \
    --local-source-directories                                  \
      pglogical3:~/src/pglogical bdr3:~/src/bdr                 \
    …

This configuration will still install Postgres Extended from the repository, but it obtains pglogical3 and bdr3 sources from the given directories on the host. These directories are bind-mounted read-only into the Docker containers at the same locations where the git repository would have been cloned to, and the default (out-of-tree) build proceeds as usual.

If you specify a local source directory for a component, you cannot specify a branch to build (cf. pglogical3:REL3_7_STABLE vs. pglogical3 for --install-from-source in the examples above). The source directory is mounted read-only in the containers, so TPA cannot do anything to change it—neither git pull, nor git checkout. You get whichever branch you have checked out locally, uncommitted changes and all.

Using --local-source-directories includes a list of Docker volume definitions in config.yml:

local_source_directories:
  - /home/ams/src/pglogical:/opt/postgres/src/pglogical:ro
  - /home/ams/src/bdr:/opt/postgres/src/bdr:ro
  - ccache-bdr_src_36-20200828200021:/root/.ccache:rw

ccache

TPA installs ccache by default for source builds of all kinds. When you are using a Docker cluster with local source directories, by default a new Docker volume is attached to the cluster's containers to serve as a shared ccache directory. This volume is completely isolated from the host, and is removed when the cluster is deprovisioned.

Use the --shared-ccache /path/to/host/ccache configure option to specify a longer-lived shared ccache directory. This directory will be bind-mounted r/w into the containers, and its contents will be shared between the host and the containers.

(By design, there is no way to install binaries compiled on the host directly into the containers.)

Rebuilding

After deploying a cluster with components built from source, you can rebuild those components quickly without having to rerun tpaexec deploy by using the tpaexec rebuild-sources command. This will run git pull for any components built from git repositories on the containers, and rebuild all components.