Parts

In the Craft Parts framework, parts are descriptions of the components to be built and prepared for deployment in a payload, either individually or as part of a larger project containing many components.

When the Craft Parts framework is used to process a part on behalf of a tool or library, it performs some or all of the steps described in the parts lifecycle: PULL, OVERLAY, BUILD, STAGE and PRIME.

Not all of these steps may be needed for every use case, and tools that use the Craft Parts framework can skip those that are not appropriate for their purposes.

Tools like Snapcraft and Charmcraft that use the concepts of parts to describe a build process typically accept specifications of parts in YAML format. This allows each part to be described in a convenient, mostly-declarative format. Libraries that use parts may use the underlying data structures to describe them.

Describing a part

Each part contains all the required information about a specific component, and is organised like a dictionary. Each piece of information is accessed by name using a property.

Generally, each part includes information about the following:

Each of these are described in the following sections.

Source

The source for a part is described using the source property. This specifies a location where the source code or other information is to be pulled from. This may be a repository on a remote server, a directory on the build host, or some other location.

Additional properties are used to fine-tune the specification so that a precise description of the source location can be given, and also to specify the type of source to be processed.

Where the type of the source information cannot be automatically determined, the source-type property is used to explicitly specify the source format. This influences the way in which the source code or data is processed. A list of supported formats can be found in the craft_parts.sources file. These include repository types, such as git, archive formats such as zip, and local for files in the local file system.

If the source type represents a file, the source-checksum property can be used to provide a checksum value to be compared against the checksum of the downloaded file.

Parts with source types that describe repositories can also use additional properties to accurately specify where source code is found. The source-branch, source-commit and source-tag properties allow sources to be obtained from a specific branch, commit or tag.

Since some repositories can contain large amounts of data, the source-depth property can be used to specify the number of commits in a repository’s history that should be fetched instead of the complete history. For repositories that use submodules, the source-submodules property can be used to fetch only those submodules that are needed.

The source-subdir property specifies the subdirectory in the unpacked sources where builds will occur. Note: This property restricts the build to the subdirectory specified, preventing access to files in the parent directory and elsewhere in the file system directory structure.

Build dependencies

The dependencies of a part are described using the build-snaps and build-packages properties. These specify lists of snaps and system packages to be installed before the part is built. If a part depends on other parts, the after property is used to specify these – see Defining the build order.

Snaps are referred to by the names that identify them in the Snap Store and can also include the channel information so that specific versions of snaps are used. For example, the juju snap could be specified as juju/stable, juju/2.9/stable or juju/latest/stable to select different versions.

System packages are referred to by the names that identify them on the host system, and they are installed using the host’s native package manager, such as apt or dnf.

For example, a part that is built against the SDL 2 libraries could include the libsdl2-dev package in the build-packages property.

Build process

Each part specifies the name of a plugin using the plugin property to describe how it should be built. The available plugins are provided by the modules in the craft_parts.plugins package.

Plugins simplify the process of building source code written in a variety of programming languages using appropriate build systems, libraries and frameworks. If a plugin is not available for a particular combination of these attributes, a basic plugin can be used to manually specify the build actions to be taken, using the override-build property. This property can also be used to replace or extend the build process provided by a plugin.

When a plugin is used, it exposes additional properties that can be used to define behaviour that is specific to the type of project that the plugin supports. For example, the cmake plugin provides the cmake-parameters and cmake-generator properties that can be used to configure how cmake is used in the build process.

The build-environment property defines assignments to shell environment variables in the build environment. This is useful in situations where the build process of a part needs to be fine-tuned and can be configured by setting environment variables.

The result of the build step is a set of build artefacts or products that are the same as those that would be produced by manually compiling or building the software.

Build artefacts

At the end of the build step, the build artefacts can be organised before the stage step is run.

The organize property is used to customise how files are copied from the building area to the staging area. It defines an ordered dictionary that maps paths in the building area to paths in the staging area.

After the build step, the stage step is run to collect the artefacts from the build into a common staging area for all parts. Additional snaps and system packages that need to be deployed with the part are specified using the stage-snaps and stage-packages properties. Files to be deployed are specified using the stage property.

In the final prime step, the files needed for deployment are copied from the staging area to the priming area. During this step the prime property is typically used to exclude files in the staging area that are not required at run-time. This is especially useful for multi-part projects that include their own compilers or development tools.

Defining the build order

If a part depends on other parts in a project as build dependencies then it can use the after property to define this relationship. This property specifies a list containing the names of parts that it will be built after. The parts in the list will be built and staged before the part is built.

This is covered in detail in Part processing order.

How parts are built

As described in Lifecycle details, parts are built in a sequence of steps: pull, overlay, build, stage and prime.

A part is built in a clean environment to ensure that only the base file system and its dependencies are present, avoiding contamination from partial builds and side effects from other builds. The environment is a file system in a container where the root user’s home directory is populated with a number of subdirectories and configured to use snaps.

Initially, before the pull step is run, the working directory contains a project directory containing the files for the project to be built.

The pull step

When the pull step is run the sources are obtained using the source definitions for each part. After the step, the working directory contains a state file to manage the state of the build and a number of subdirectories:

  • parts is where individual parts for the project are prepared for build. The directory for each part in the parts directory contains src, build and install directories that will be used during the build step.

  • prime will contain the finished build product later in the process.

  • project contains the original, unmodified project files.

  • stage will contain staged files after a build, before they are primed.

The standard actions for the pull step can be overridden or extended by using the override-pull key to describe a series of actions.

The overlay step

The overlay step is used in some Craft tools to provide an additional layer that overlays the base filesystem layer. Check Overlay step explanation for more details.

The build step

When the build step is run, each part in the parts subdirectory is processed in the order described in the build order. The plugin for the part will use the appropriate build system to build the part in its build subdirectory, using a copy of the files in its src subdirectory, and install the result in the part’s install subdirectory. The files in the install directory will be organised according to the rules in the part’s organize property.

After the build step is run, the directory for each part in the parts directory will contain updated build and install directories. The build directory will contain the build products, and the install directory will contain the files to be included in the payload.

Parts that depend on other parts will be built after their dependencies have been built and staged.

The stage step

When the stage step is run for a part, the contents of its install directory are copied into the common stage directory. Additionally, dependencies specified by the stage-packages and stage-snaps properties of the part are also unpacked into the stage directory.

The result is that stage directory can contain the files needed for the final payload as well as resources for other parts. If other parts need a part, such as a compiler, to be built and staged before they can be built, their build steps will run after the stage step for the part they depend on.

The prime step

When the prime step is run for a part, the contents of the common stage directory are filtered using the rules in the prime property and copied into the prime directory.

In a multi-part project the stage directory may contain resources that were required to build certain parts, or the build products may include files that are not needed at run-time. Using a separate prime directory in a separate prime step makes it possible to apply a filter to the build products.