BuildBox

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BuildBox shell ​

BuildBox provides an optional interactive shell, available via bbx shell. It uses ZSH. Its configuration is located at settings/zsh/.zshrc and serves the following purposes:

Environment refresh ​

Environment may be altered by different factors (target change, tool installation...), see Local environment.

The environment is refreshed before every command, and before every prompt, ZSH precmd and preexec hooks are used for this.

WARNING

There is a limit: when you paste several lines in BuildBox shell, the environment is not refreshed between them. If one of them makes changes to the environment, it is not seen by following commands.

Host applications ​

Host applications can be launched from BuildBox. The project being mounted at the same path in the container, argument paths only need to be made absolute, by bb_path_to_host().

To start an application on host, pipes are used to communicate between container and host. Such pipes are created every time a BuildBox launcher is started, then every launcher has its dedicated communication pipes. These pipes are stored in the project tmp/ directory:

  • send pipe, to send a command to the host: $BB_PROJECT_DIR/tmp/launcher-$BB_LAUNCHER_ID_send.pipe,
  • return pipe, to get back the command return code in the container: $BB_PROJECT_DIR/tmp/launcher-$BB_LAUNCHER_ID_ret.pipe.

See bb_host_send() (container side) and docker/bin/bbx (host side) for details on this pipes communication implementation.

Moreover, a file is used to store host application output, also reachable from container: $BB_PROJECT_DIR/tmp/launcher-$BB_LAUNCHER_ID_send.out. See bb_host_send_print_out() for details about this.

Finally, there are implementation functions for some applications to use this mechanism: VS-Code, Meld, Gitk...). See host applications from BuildBox container.

Goto ​

Several special commands allow to change current working directory of the shell: goto <package>, target goto and project goto, see goto commands.

These commands are implemented in settings/zsh/.zshrc, and on the host side by the shell plugin.

Completion ​

Completion rules are defined in settings/zsh/comp folder. It is based on ZSH completion system.