container/BUILDING.md

Building the project

To build the container project, you need:

• Mac with Apple silicon
• macOS 15 minimum, macOS 26 beta recommended
• Xcode 26 beta

Compile and test

Build container and the background services from source, and run basic and integration tests:

make all test integration

Copy the binaries to /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/libexec (requires entering an administrator password):

make install

Compile protobufs

container uses gRPC to communicate to the builder virtual machine that creates images from Dockerfiles, and depends on specific versions of grpc-swift and swift-protobuf. If you make changes to the gRPC APIs in the container-builder-shim project, install the tools and re-generate the gRPC code in this project using:

make protos

Develop using a local copy of Containerization

To make changes to container that require changes to the Containerization project, or vice versa:

1. Clone the Containerization repository such that it sits next to your clone of the container repository. Ensure that you follow containerization instructions to prepare your build environment.

2. In your development shell, go to the container project directory.

   cd container
   

3. If the container services are already running, stop them.

   bin/container system stop
   

4. Configure the environment variable CONTAINERIZATION_PATH to refer to your Containerization project, and update your Package.resolved file.

   export CONTAINERIZATION_PATH=../containerization
   swift package update containerization
   

5. Build the init filesystem for your local copy of the Containerization project.

   (cd ${CONTAINERIZATION_PATH} && make clean all)
   

6. Build container.

   make clean all
   

7. Start the container services.

   bin/container system start
   

To revert to using the Containerization dependency from your Package.swift:

1. Unset your CONTAINERIZATION_PATH environment variable, and update Package.resolved.

   unset CONTAINERIZATION_PATH
   swift package update containerization
   

2. Rebuild container.

   make clean all
   

3. Restart the container services.

   bin/container system restart