Packaging and Integration

This document describes how to build and package bootc for distribution in operating systems.

Build Requirements

• Rust toolchain (see rust-toolchain.toml for the version)
• coreutils and make

Basic Build Commands

The primary build targets are:

make all

This builds:

• Binary artifacts (cargo build --release)
• Man pages (via cargo xtask manpages)

The built binaries are placed in target/release/:

• bootc - The main bootc CLI
• system-reinstall-bootc - System reinstallation tool
• bootc-initramfs-setup - Initramfs setup utility

Installation

The install target supports the standard DESTDIR variable for staged installations, which is essential for packaging:

make install DESTDIR=/path/to/staging/root

The install target handles:

• Binary installation to $(prefix)/bin
• Man pages to $(prefix)/share/man/man{5,8}
• systemd units to $(prefix)/lib/systemd/system
• Documentation and examples to $(prefix)/share/doc/bootc
• Dracut module to /usr/lib/dracut/modules.d/51bootc
• Base image configuration files

Optional Installation Targets

install-ostree-hooks

For distributions that need bootc to provide compatibility with ostree container commands:

make install-ostree-hooks DESTDIR=/tmp/stage

This creates symbolic links in $(prefix)/libexec/libostree/ext/ for:

• ostree-container
• ostree-ima-sign
• ostree-provisional-repair

Source Packaging

Vendored Dependencies

bootc is written in Rust and has numerous dependencies. For distribution packaging, we recommend using a vendored tarball of Rust crates to ensure reproducible builds and avoid network access during the build process.

Generating the Vendor Tarball

Use the cargo xtask package command to generate both source and vendor tarballs:

cargo xtask package

This creates two files in the target/ directory:

• bootc-<version>.tar.zstd - Source tarball with git archive contents
• bootc-<version>-vendor.tar.zstd - Vendored Rust dependencies

The source tarball includes a .cargo/vendor-config.toml file that configures cargo to use the vendored dependencies.

Using Vendored Dependencies in Builds

When building with vendored dependencies:

1. Extract both tarballs into your build directory
2. Extract the vendor tarball to create a vendor/ directory
3. Ensure .cargo/vendor-config.toml is in place (included in source tarball)
4. Build normally with make all

The cargo build will automatically use the vendored crates instead of fetching from crates.io.

Version Management

The version is derived from git tags. The cargo xtask package command automatically determines the version:

• If the current commit has a tag: uses the tag (e.g., v1.0.0 becomes 1.0.0)
• Otherwise: generates a timestamp-based version with commit hash (e.g., 202501181430.g1234567890)

This ensures that development snapshots have monotonically increasing version numbers.

Cargo Features

The build respects the CARGO_FEATURES environment variable. By default, the Makefile auto-detects whether to enable the rhsm (Red Hat Subscription Manager) feature based on the build environment's /usr/lib/os-release.

To explicitly control features:

make all CARGO_FEATURES="rhsm"

Integration Testing

For distributions that want to include integration tests, use:

make install-all DESTDIR=/tmp/stage

This installs:

• Everything from make install
• Everything from make install-ostree-hooks
• The integration test binary as bootc-integration-tests

Base image content

Alongside building the binary here, you may also want to prepare a base image. For that, see bootc-images.

Additional Resources

• See Makefile for all available targets and variables
• See crates/xtask/src/xtask.rs for cargo xtask implementation details
• See contrib/packaging/bootc.spec for an example RPM spec file that uses all of the above.

The Linux Foundation® (TLF) has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of TLF trademarks, see Trademark Usage.