DEVELOPMENT.md

Developer Guide

This document explains how to develop and test Modus.

Building Custom BuildKit Frontend

To build a custom BuildKit frontend, please first generate a Dockerfile for it, e.g.:

./target/debug/modus transpile Modusfile 'all("frontend", "release")' > /tmp/modus-frontend.Dockerfile

After that, build a frontend image:

docker build -f /tmp/modus-frontend.Dockerfile . -t my-buildkit-frontend

The frontend can be enabled by passing its name to modus build using the option --custom-buildkit-frontend:

modus build ... --custom-buildkit-frontend my-buildkit-frontend

Executing Integration Tests

To run integration tests, use the following command:

cd test
python -m unittest discover

Use the environment variable MODUS_EXECUTABLE to specify the modus executable (modus by default), and MODUS_BUILDKIT_FRONTEND to specify custom BuildKit frontend (None by default).

Making a New Release

The GitHub Actions workflow handles building, testing and making a draft release on GitHub, but the following steps need to be done manually:

1. Increment the version number in modus/Cargo.toml and modus-lib/Cargo.toml. Note that the modus-lib dependency in modus/Cargo.toml also need to have its version incremented.

2. Commit these changes, then create a new git tag pointing to the version bumping commit with the next version number, e.g.:

    git tag 0.1.2
   

   and push the tag to trigger the workflow:

    git push && git push --tags
   

3. Once the workflow is complete, publish the source code to crates.io with:

    ./cargo-publish.sh
   

4. The workflow will only create a draft release on GitHub. Go to the Releases page and publish the draft.