cachepot distributed compilation quickstart

This is a quick start guide to getting distributed compilation working with cachepot. This guide primarily covers Linux clients. macOS and Windows clients are supported but have seen significantly less testing.

Get cachepot binaries

Either download pre-built cachepot binaries (not currently available), or build cachepot locally with the dist-client and dist-worker features enabled:

cargo build --release --features="dist-client dist-worker"

The target/release/cachepot binary will be used on the client, and the target/release/cachepot-dist binary will be used on the scheduler and build worker.

If you're only planning to use the client, it is enabled by default, so just cargo install cachepot should do the trick.

Configure a scheduler

If you're adding a worker to a cluster that has already be set up, skip ahead to configuring a build worker.

The scheduler is a daemon that manages compile request from clients and parcels them out to build workers. You only need one of these per cachepot setup. Currently only Linux is supported for running the scheduler.

Create a scheduler.conf file to configure client/worker authentication. A minimal example looks like:

# The socket address the scheduler will listen on. It's strongly recommended
# to listen on localhost and put a HTTPS worker in front of it.
public_addr = "127.0.0.1:10600"

[client_auth]
type = "token"
token = "my client token"

[worker_auth]
type = "jwt_hs256"
secret_key = "my secret key"

Mozilla build workers will typically require clients to be authenticated with the Mozilla identity system.

To configure for scheduler for this, the client_auth section should be as follows so any client tokens are validated with the Mozilla service:

[client_auth]
type = "mozilla"
required_groups = ["group_name"]

Where group_name is a Mozilla LDAP group. Users will be required to belong to this group to successfully authenticate with the scheduler.

Start the scheduler by running:

cachepot-dist scheduler --config scheduler.conf

Like the local worker, the scheduler process will daemonize itself unless CACHEPOT_NO_DAEMON=1 is set. If the scheduler fails to start you may need to set RUST_LOG=trace when starting it to get useful diagnostics (or to get less noisy logs: RUST_LOG=cachepot=trace,cachepot-dist=trace ).

Configure a build worker

A build worker communicates with the scheduler and executes compiles requested by clients. Only Linux is supported for running a build worker, but executing cross-compile requests from macOS/Windows clients is supported.

The build worker requires bubblewrap to sandbox execution, at least version 0.3.0. Verify your version of bubblewrap before attempting to run the worker. On Ubuntu 18.10+ you can apt install bubblewrap to install it. If you build from source you will need to first install your distro's equivalent of the libcap-dev package.

Create a worker.conf file to configure authentication, storage locations, network addresses and the path to bubblewrap. A minimal example looks like:

# This is where client toolchains will be stored.
cache_dir = "/tmp/toolchains"
# The maximum size of the toolchain cache, in bytes.
# If unspecified the default is 10GB.
# toolchain_cache_size = 10737418240
# A public IP address and port that clients will use to connect to this builder.
public_addr = "192.168.1.1:10501"
# The URL used to connect to the scheduler (should use https, given an ideal
# setup of a HTTPS worker in front of the scheduler)
scheduler_url = "https://192.168.1.1"

[builder]
type = "overlay"
# The directory under which a sandboxed filesystem will be created for builds.
build_dir = "/tmp/build"
# The path to the bubblewrap version 0.3.0+ `bwrap` binary.
bwrap_path = "/usr/bin/bwrap"

[scheduler_auth]
type = "jwt_token"
# This will be generated by the `generate-jwt-hs256-worker-token` command or
# provided by an administrator of the cachepot cluster.
token = "my worker's token"

Due to bubblewrap requirements currently the build worker must be run as root. Start the build worker by running:

sudo cachepot-dist worker --config worker.conf

As with the scheduler, if the build worker fails to start you may need to set RUST_LOG=trace to get useful diagnostics. (or to get less noisy logs: RUST_LOG=cachepot=trace,cachepot-dist=trace ).

Configure a client

A client uses cachepot to wrap compile commands, communicates with the scheduler to find available build workers, and communicates with build workers to execute the compiles and receive the results.

Clients that are not targeting linux64 require the icecc-create-env script or should be provided with an archive. icecc-create-env is part of icecream for packaging toolchains. You can install icecream to get this script (apt install icecc on Ubuntu), or download it from the git repository and place it in your PATH: curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/icecc/icecream/master/client/icecc-create-env.in > icecc-create-env && chmod +x icecc-create-env. See using custom toolchains.

Create a client config file in ~/.config/cachepot/config (on Linux), ~/Library/Application Support/Parity.cachepot/config (on macOS), or %APPDATA%\Parity\cachepot\config\config (on Windows). A minimal example looks like:

[dist]
# The URL used to connect to the scheduler (should use https, given an ideal
# setup of a HTTPS worker in front of the scheduler)
scheduler_url = "https://192.168.1.1"
# Used for mapping local toolchains to remote cross-compile toolchains. Empty in
# this example where the client and build worker are both Linux.
toolchains = []
# Size of the local toolchain cache, in bytes (5GB here, 10GB if unspecified).
toolchain_cache_size = 5368709120

[dist.auth]
type = "token"
# This should match the `client_auth` section of the scheduler config.
token = "my client token"

Clients using Mozilla build workers should configure their dist.auth section as follows:

[dist.auth]
type = "mozilla"

And retrieve a token from the Mozilla identity service by running cachepot --dist-auth and following the instructions. Completing this process will retrieve and cache a token valid for 7 days.

Make sure to run cachepot --stop-coordinator and cachepot --start-coordinator if cachepot was running before changing the configuration.

You can check the status with cachepot --dist-status, it should say something like:

$ cachepot --dist-status
{"SchedulerStatus":["https://cachepot1.corpdmz.ber3.mozilla.com/",{"num_workers":3,"num_cpus":56,"in_progress":24}]}

For diagnostics, advice for scheduler/worker does not work with RUSTC_WRAPPER. Therefore following approach is advised: CACHEPOT_LOG=trace RUSTC_WRAPPER=... cargo build.

Using custom toolchains

Since Windows and macOS cannot automatically package toolchains, it is important to be able to manually specify toolchains for distribution. This functionality is also available on Linux.

Using custom toolchains involves adding a dist.toolchains section to your client config file (you can add it multiple times to specify multiple toolchains).

On Linux and macOS:

[[dist.toolchains]]
type = "path_override"
compiler_executable = "/home/me/.mozbuild/clang/bin/clang"
archive = "/home/me/.mozbuild/toolchains/33d92fcd79ffef6e-clang-dist-toolchain.tar.xz"
archive_compiler_executable = "/builds/worker/toolchains/clang/bin/clang"

On Windows:

[[dist.toolchains]]
type = "path_override"
compiler_executable = "C:/clang/bin\\clang-cl.exe"
archive = "C:/toolchains/33d92fcd79ffef6e-clang-dist-toolchain.tar.xz"
archive_compiler_executable = "/builds/worker/toolchains/clang/bin/clang"

Where:

  • compiler_executable identifies the path that cachepot will match against to activate this configuration (you need to be careful on Windows - paths can have slashes in both directions, and you may need to escape backslashes, as in the example)
  • archive is the compressed tar archive containing the compiler toolchain to distribute when compiler_executable is matched
  • archive_compiler_executable is the path within the archive the distributed compilation should invoke

A toolchain archive should be a Gzip compressed TAR archive, containing a filesystem sufficient to run the compiler without relying on any external files. If you have archives compatible with icecream (created with icecc-create-env, like these ones for macOS), they should also work with cachepot. To create a Windows toolchain, it is recommended that you download the Clang binaries for Ubuntu 16.04 and extract them, package up the toolchain using the extracted bin/clang file (requires PR #321) and then insert bin/clang-cl at the appropriate path as a symlink to the bin/clang binary.

Considerations when distributing from macOS

When distributing from a macOS client, additional flags and configuration may be required:

  • An explicit target should be passed to the compiler, for instance by adding --target=x86_64-apple-darwin16.0.0 to your build system's CFLAGS.
  • An explicit toolchain archive will need to be configured, as described above. In case rust is being cached, the same version of rustc will need to be used for local compiles as is found in the distributed archive.
  • The client config will be read from ~/Library/Application Support/Parity.cachepot/config, not ~/.config/cachepot/config.
  • Some cross compilers may not understand some intrinsics used in more recent macOS SDKs. The 10.11 SDK is known to work.

Making a build worker start at boot time

It is very easy with a systemd service to spawn the worker on boot.

You can create a service file like /etc/systemd/system/cachepot-worker.service with the following contents:

[Unit]
Description=cachepot-dist worker
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/path/to/cachepot-dist worker --config /path/to/worker.conf

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Note that if the cachepot-dist binary is in a user's home directory, and you're in a distro with SELinux enabled (like Fedora), you may need to use an ExecStart line like:

ExecStart=/bin/bash -c "/home/<user>/path/to/cachepot-dist worker --config /home/<user>/path/to/worker.conf"

This is because SELinux by default prevents services from running binaries in home directories, for some reason. Using a shell works around that. An alternative would be to move the cachepot-dist binary to somewhere like /usr/local/bin, but then you need to remember to update it manually.

After creating that file, you can ensure it's working and enable it by default like:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl start cachepot-worker
systemctl status # And check it's fine.
systemctl enable cachepot-worker # This enables the service on boot