rattler-build: a fast conda-package builder

The rattler-build tooling and library creates cross-platform relocatable binaries / packages from a simple recipe format. The recipe format is heavily inspired by conda-build and boa, and the output of a regular rattler-build run is a package that can be installed using mamba, rattler or conda.

rattler-build does not have any dependencies on conda-build or Python and works as a standalone binary.

Installation

You can grab a prerelease version of rattler-build from the Github Releases.

Alternatively, you can install rattler-build via Homebrew:

brew install rattler-build

rattler-build is also available on Arch Linux in the extra repository:

pacman -S rattler-build

Dependencies

Currently rattler-build needs some dependencies on the host system which are executed as subprocess. We plan to reduce the number of external dependencies over time by writing what we need in Rust to make rattler-build fully self-contained.

tar to unpack tarballs downloaded from the internet in a variety of formats. .gz, .bz2 and .xz are widely used and one might have to install the compression packages as well (e.g. gzip, bzip2, ...)
patch to patch source code after downloading
install_name_tool is necessary on macOS to rewrite the rpath of shared libraries and executables to make it relative
patchelf is required on Linux to rewrite the rpath and runpath of shared libraries and executables
git to checkout Git repositories (not implemented yet, but will require git in the future)
msvc on Windows because we cannot ship the MSVC compiler on conda-forge (needs to be installed on the host machine)

On Windows, to obtain these dependencies from conda-forge, one can install m2-patch, m2-bzip2, m2-gzip, m2-tar.

Documentation

We have extensive documentation for rattler-build. You can find the book here.

Usage

rattler-build comes with two commands: build and test.

The build command takes a --recipe recipe.yaml as input and produces a package as output. The test subcommand can be used to test existing packages (tests are shipped with the package).

The recipe format

Note You can find all examples below in the examples folder and run them with rattler-build.

A simple example recipe for the xtensor header-only C++ library:

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/prefix-dev/recipe-format/main/schema.json

context:
  name: xtensor
  version: 0.24.6
  sha256: f87259b51aabafdd1183947747edfff4cff75d55375334f2e81cee6dc68ef655

package:
  name: ${{ name|lower }}
  version: ${{ version }}

source:
  url: https://github.com/xtensor-stack/xtensor/archive/${{ version }}.tar.gz
  sha256: ${{ sha256 }}

build:
  number: 0
  # note: in the new recipe format, `skip` is a list of conditional expressions
  #       but for the "YAML format" discussion we pretend that we still use the
  #       `skip: bool` syntax
  skip: ${{ true if (win and vc14) }}
  script:
    - if: win
      then: |
        cmake -G "NMake Makefiles" -D BUILD_TESTS=OFF -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=%LIBRARY_PREFIX% %SRC_DIR%
        nmake
        nmake install
      else: |
        cmake ${CMAKE_ARGS} -DBUILD_TESTS=OFF -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$PREFIX $SRC_DIR -DCMAKE_INSTALL_LIBDIR=lib
        make install

requirements:
  build:
    - ${{ compiler('cxx') }}
    - cmake
    - if: unix
      then: make
  host:
    - xtl >=0.7,<0.8
  run:
    - xtl >=0.7,<0.8
  run_constrained:
    - xsimd >=8.0.3,<10

tests:
  - script:
    - if: unix or emscripten
      then:
        - test -d ${PREFIX}/include/xtensor
        - test -f ${PREFIX}/include/xtensor/xarray.hpp
        - test -f ${PREFIX}/share/cmake/xtensor/xtensorConfig.cmake
        - test -f ${PREFIX}/share/cmake/xtensor/xtensorConfigVersion.cmake
    - if: win
      then:
        - if not exist %LIBRARY_PREFIX%\include\xtensor\xarray.hpp (exit 1)
        - if not exist %LIBRARY_PREFIX%\share\cmake\xtensor\xtensorConfig.cmake (exit 1)
        - if not exist %LIBRARY_PREFIX%\share\cmake\xtensor\xtensorConfigVersion.cmake (exit 1)

about:
  homepage: https://github.com/xtensor-stack/xtensor
  license: BSD-3-Clause
  license_file: LICENSE
  summary: The C++ tensor algebra library
  description: Multi dimensional arrays with broadcasting and lazy computing
  documentation: https://xtensor.readthedocs.io
  repository: https://github.com/xtensor-stack/xtensor

extra:
  recipe-maintainers:
    - some-maintainer

A recipe for the `rich` Python package (using `noarch`)

context:
  version: "13.4.2"

package:
  name: "rich"
  version: ${{ version }}

source:
  - url: https://pypi.io/packages/source/r/rich/rich-${{ version }}.tar.gz
    sha256: d653d6bccede5844304c605d5aac802c7cf9621efd700b46c7ec2b51ea914898

build:
  # Thanks to `noarch: python` this package works on all platforms
  noarch: python
  script:
    - python -m pip install . -vv --no-deps --no-build-isolation

requirements:
  host:
    - pip
    - poetry-core >=1.0.0
    - python 3.10
  run:
    # sync with normalized deps from poetry-generated setup.py
    - markdown-it-py >=2.2.0
    - pygments >=2.13.0,<3.0.0
    - python 3.10
    - typing_extensions >=4.0.0,<5.0.0

tests:
  - python:
      imports:
        - rich
      pip_check: true

about:
  homepage: https://github.com/Textualize/rich
  license: MIT
  license_file: LICENSE
  summary: Render rich text, tables, progress bars, syntax highlighting, markdown and more to the terminal
  description: |
    Rich is a Python library for rich text and beautiful formatting in the terminal.

    The Rich API makes it easy to add color and style to terminal output. Rich
    can also render pretty tables, progress bars, markdown, syntax highlighted
    source code, tracebacks, and more — out of the box.
  documentation: https://rich.readthedocs.io
  repository: https://github.com/Textualize/rich

A recipe for the `curl` library

context:
  version: "8.0.1"

package:
  name: curl
  version: ${{ version }}

source:
  url: http://curl.haxx.se/download/curl-${{ version }}.tar.bz2
  sha256: 9b6b1e96b748d04b968786b6bdf407aa5c75ab53a3d37c1c8c81cdb736555ccf

build:
  number: 0

requirements:
  build:
    - ${{ compiler('c') }}
    - if: win
      then:
        - cmake
        - ninja
    - if: unix
      then:
        - make
        - perl
        - pkg-config
        - libtool
  host:
    - if: linux
      then:
        - openssl

about:
  homepage: http://curl.haxx.se/
  license: MIT/X derivate (http://curl.haxx.se/docs/copyright.html)
  license_file: COPYING
  summary: tool and library for transferring data with URL syntax
  description: |
    Curl is an open source command line tool and library for transferring data
    with URL syntax. It is used in command lines or scripts to transfer data.
  documentation: https://curl.haxx.se/docs/
  repository: https://github.com/curl/curl

For this recipe, two additional script files (build.sh and build.bat) are needed.

build.sh

#!/bin/bash

# Get an updated config.sub and config.guess
cp $BUILD_PREFIX/share/libtool/build-aux/config.* .

if [[ $target_platform =~ linux.* ]]; then
    USESSL="--with-openssl=${PREFIX}"
else
    USESSL="--with-secure-transport"
fi;

./configure \
    --prefix=${PREFIX} \
    --host=${HOST} \
    ${USESSL} \
    --with-ca-bundle=${PREFIX}/ssl/cacert.pem \
    --disable-static --enable-shared

make -j${CPU_COUNT} ${VERBOSE_AT}
make install

# Includes man pages and other miscellaneous.
rm -rf "${PREFIX}/share"

build.bat