Sharing Packages
Private Sharing
opam-bin provides a simple way to share the binary packages
with other users and computers: it automatically creates an
opam repository with the binary packages that are created. The
repository is located in ~/.opam/plugins/opam-bin/store/repo
and the corresponding archives are in
~/.opam/plugins/opam-bin/store/archives.
By sharing the directory ~/.opam/plugins/opam-bin/store/ with other
computers, you can simply reuse your binary packages. Here is such an
example session:
opam-bin clean
opam switch create 4.07.1
opam install alt-ergo -y
rsync -auv --delete ~/.opam/plugins/opam-bin/store other-computer:/tmp/
rsync -auv --delete ~/.opam/plugins/opam-bin/cache other-computer:/tmp/
ssh other-computer
$ opam remote set-url default --all --set-default file:///tmp/store/repo
$ opam switch create --empty
$ opam install alt-ergo+bin
Note that we also add to share ~/.opam/plugins/opam-bin/cache on the
other computer, because without specific configuration, the url
{ src: } field in generated opam files will not provide the
correct path to the archive. Fortunately, opam is able to use
the cache to find the archives.
Public Sharing
If you want to share your binary packages on a public repository, it requires almost no additional work: you only need to specify the URL of your web-server in an option:
opam-bin config --base-url http://my.server.com/opam-bin
This command will not only change the configuration for newly created
packages, but also modify already generated binary packages to use
this URL for the url { src: } field.
After this command, the repository is expected to be copied in
http://my.server.com/opam-bin/repo, while archives are
expected to be available in
http://my.server.com/opam-bin/archives.
opam-bin also provides a simple way to copy the repository on
the remote server. You first need to specify where the files should be
copied, and then use the opam-bin push command:
opam-bin config --rsync-url my.server.com:/var/www/opam-bin
opam-bin push
By default, this opam-bin push will delete all upstream
packages that are not locally present. It will also generate in the
repository a file index.tar.gz for opam, and a file
index.html listing all available packages.
If you don’t want this behavior, i.e. you only want to merge new
packages, you should use the --merge option, you will also
need to recreate the file index.tar.gz upstream:
opam-bin config --rsync-url my.server.com:/var/www/opam-bin
opam-bin push --merge
ssh my.server.com
$ cd /var/www/opam-bin/repo
$ opam admin index
Yet, most of the time, you will want to build your packages on top of
former binary packages, so you may want to first download your
upstream repo locally, so that you will be able to avoid the
--merge option. For that, you can use opam-bin
pull. For example, if you want to add a binary package for
alt-ergo and its dependencies:
opam-bin config --rsync-url my.server.com:/var/www/opam-bin
opam-bin pull
opam install alt-ergo -y
opam-bin push
It is possible to customize the header and trailer of the generated
index.html file by defining the files
~/.opam/plugins/opam-bin/header.html and
~/.opam/plugins/opam-bin/trailer.html. To test the impact of
changing these files, you can use:
opam-bin push --local-only
to generate a new
~/.opam/plugins/opam-bin/store/repo/index.html file and check
the result.
Using a Binary Repository Only
Once a repository with binary packages has been published,
opam-bin is not needed to use it.
For example:
export OPAMROOT=$HOME/opam-root
opam init --bare -n https://www.origin-labs.com/opam-bin/debian10.4-amd64/4.10.0
opam switch create alt-ergo --empty
opam install alt-ergo -y