Swift Tools

Installing swift on a non-ubuntu linux distribution was annoying at best. Mostly due to library linkages, and versions installed. Which is a great case for just throwing it in a container that has the necessary libs in the right places. And apple graciously provides a docker image already!

This automates the process of building your project in a swift container, then copying into a trimmed down swift-runtime container.

And it supports unprivileged (i.e. rootless) containers. (Just run ./rootless-setup.sh to prep your system).

Also, as I dislike the docker runtime, this uses podman and buildah instead. But the podman run commands are essentially the exact same as docker run, so you could reasonably just swap out the command being called. And change out the buildah commands for an equivalent multistage dockerfile.

Installation

Clone the repository
Put it in your $PATH perhaps

You are welcome to rename the swift script to something else, if you don't want to shadow the actual swift binary. But if you did get that installed, what are you doing here?

Usage

Running during Development

A swift-run script was created for running a project (i.e. running swift a.swift b.swift dir/c.swift...) without outputting a compiled binary. This is often used during development or scripting. Use with swift-run <files...>.

Compile & output a slimmed down container

If you are compiling a final unit, you can create a production container with your compiled app, and only the swift runtime (removing the swift development tools). This allows for a much smaller container, and none of your source files.

building

From your project root, run swift. This will copy your current dir to the build container, compile, and copy the resulting binary to the runtime container. It will print out the commands you can run to then run your binary

running

Run the command printed out from the build step. It will likely be podman run --rm -it swift-<projectname>. Where projectname is the name of the directory you were in. You can change this name during build, by running swift NAME to make a container called swift-NAME.

REPL

You may launch into a swift repl by running swift-repl. This requires a few extra permissions and capabilities (when run unprivileged), so those flags have been taken care of in this script. It is necessary to keep the swift-seccomp.json file alongside the swift-repl script for it to run correctly.

As a convenience, you can reuse the Makefile template given here, to automate this even further. Just put your preferred [NAME] into the TARGET= line. Then running make will build. make run will run. make clean will clean up the built container.