Binary distribution internals

Reproducibility

The binaries we build in GitHub Actions and distribute in our releases come from an intricate process meant to ensure reproducibility.

While the ability to produce the same exact binaries from the corresponding Git commits is a good idea for any open source project, it is a requirement for software that deals with digital tokens of significant value.

Docker containers for internal use

The easiest way to guarantee that users are able to replicate our binaries for themselves is to give them the same software environment we used in CI. Docker containers fit the bill, so everything starts with the architecture- and OS-specific containers in docker/dist/base_image/.

These images contain all the packages we need, are built and published once (to Docker Hub), and are then reused as the basis for temporary Docker images where the nimbus-eth2 build is carried out.

These temporary images are controlled by Dockerfiles in docker/dist/. Since we're not publishing them anywhere, we can customize them to the system they run on (we ensure they use the host's UID/GID, the host's QEMU static binaries, etc); they get access to the source code through the use of external volumes.

Build process

It all starts from the GitHub actions in .github/workflows/release.yml. There is a different job for each supported OS-architecture combination and they all run in parallel (ideally).

Once all those CI jobs complete successfully, a GitHub release draft is created and all the distributable archives are uploaded to it. A list of checksums for the main binaries is inserted in the release description. That draft needs to be manually published.

The build itself is triggered by a Make target. E.g.: make dist-amd64. This invokes scripts/make_dist.sh which builds the corresponding Docker container from docker/dist/ and runs it with the Git repository's top directory as an external volume.

The entry point for that container is docker/dist/entry_point.sh and that's where you'll find the Make invocations needed to finally build the software and create distributable tarballs.

Docker images for end users

Configured in .github/workflows/release.yml (only for Linux AMD64, ARM and ARM64): we unpack the distribution tarball and copy its content into a third type of Docker image - meant for end users and defined by docker/dist/binaries/Dockerfile.amd64 (and related).

We then publish that to Docker Hub.