BuildBox

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Advanced features ​

Settings ​

BuildBox settings defaults can be changed in config files. Three of them are read, in this order:

  1. /etc/buildbox/config: system settings, shared by all the users of the machine
  2. ~/.config/buildbox/config: user settings, shared by all your projects ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME/buildbox/config when XDG_CONFIG_HOME is set)
  3. .bbx/config: project settings, versioned with the project profile

Each file overrides the previous ones, and all of them override BuildBox defaults. A setting defined in a file and not redefined by a higher priority one is kept.

A config file is a shell fragment only made of variable assignments, one per line:

bash
BB_BUILD_JOBS=16
BB_PREBUILT_SERVER=prebuilt.example.com

Accepted options are:

  • BB_BUILD_JOBS: set to 9 by default, it is the number of jobs to spawn when building packages
  • BB_TRASH_KEEP_DAYS: set to 15 by default, it is the minimum time to keep files in the trash before automatically removing them
  • BB_DEBUG: disabled by default, set to 1 to enable debug (very verbose in standard output)

There are also prebuilt target options which are detailed in prebuilt target section.

The system and user files are also the shell plugin configuration files, so they can hold BBX_* options such as BBX_PROMPT_ENABLED next to the settings above. These options are read by the host shell only: they have no effect in .bbx/config.

Settings are read every time a BuildBox command runs, so a change is taken into account by the next command. However, the system and user configuration directories are bind-mounted in the project container when it starts: if you created /etc/buildbox/ or ~/.config/buildbox/ while a container was already running, stop it with bbx instance stop so that they are mounted again.

TIP

The same settings can also be set as environment variables on the host before running bbx, which is handy for a one-shot change:

BB_BUILD_JOBS=32 bbx target build

Note that a setting present in a config file takes precedence over the environment.

Administration mode ​

Although it is possible to use sudo inside BuildBox, you also have an administration shell available. It is helpful to configure the system inside the container or to add system packages.

To open an administration shell, run from the container:

sudo -i

DANGER

If adding package or changing configuration as administrator, you should discuss with your BuildBox maintainer to make these changes available in the future container image release ! Else, you will have an environment not synchronized with other developers working on the same projects as you.