HighHeat

If you are in a hurry, baking with HighHeat is the way to go.

HighHeat offers a fast alternative to BitBake for rapid iterative development. By bypassing the entire BitBake process, HighHeat directly builds the recipe in the work directory and deploys it to the existing image on the target, significantly reducing the time from code changes to execution. Additionally, HighHeat is compatible with Moulin.

HH does not check any dependencies, nor does it create images from scratch or touches bitbake metadata. You need to have the project built at least once with BitBake before using HighHeat.

Reasoning (rambling)

Yocto is a very good tool, until you start developing with it. (c) padre

My main problem with developing inside Yocto is that there is no good way to iterate on your changes. You basically have two options: You can either rebuild everything with bitbake, which takes an ungodly amount of time, or dive inside the "guts" of the workdir and try to do something faster by hand, which is very tedious and breaks you out of the development loop.

For some time I managed to work around this by using a lot of bash scripts, but this approach is not very reliable or pleasant.

So the time has come to create a better solution. Now, instead of finding the relevant workdir, running "compile, install, deploy" loop, downloading the relevant image from the target, unpacking/mounting it by hand, finding and copying the relevant files, and packing and uploading everything back to the target, you can just do this:

hh build-deploy project-name target-path

And HH will do all of that for you.

Roadmap

• Implement edit
• Implement build
• Implement deploy
• Implement project autodetection
• Implement confirmation before running any shell commands
• Add support for ramdisk images
• Add support for remote targets
• Add support for non-standard projects (xen, linux)
• Try to get rid of sudo
• Advanced deploy targets (subfolders inside images)
• Option to do remote via sshfs
• Compile commands generation
• Local image editing

Installation

Install with pip

pip3 install --user git+https://github.com/deedone/highheat

Usage

usage: hh [-h] [--verbose] [--dryrun] [--noconfirm] {edit,e,build,b,deploy,d,build-deploy,bd,info,i,editimg,ei} ...

HighHeat, a fast BitBake alternative

positional arguments:
  {edit,e,build,b,deploy,d,build-deploy,bd,info,i,editimg,ei}
                        Action to perform
    edit (e)            Open source dir in editor
    build (b)           Build project
    deploy (d)          Deploy project
    build-deploy (bd)   Build and deploy the project
    info (i)            Show project info
    editimg (ei)        Modify image interactively

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --verbose, -v         Verbose output
  --dryrun, -n          Dry run
  --noconfirm, -y       Do not confirm commands

If target is an image, you can specify additional subpath to be used
inside the unpacked image.
Example:
    hh deploy linux host:/tftpdir/uInitrams,/path/to/linux

Linux project handles both Kernel image and DTB files, depending on target path.
Example:
    hh deploy linux host:/tftpdir/uInitrams,/path/to/linux
    hh deploy linux host:/tftpdir/uInitrams,/path/to/file.dtb

Other examples:

    Edit xen from DomD:
        hh edit domd xen

    Build xen-tools current yocto project:
        hh build xen-tools

    Autodetect and build the project (based on the current directory)
        hh build

    Deploy xen-tools to /srv/tftp:
        hh deploy xen-tools host:/srv/tftp

    Deploy qemu to domd-rootfs.ext4:
        hh deploy qemu /path/to/domd-rootfs.ext

    Interactively edit the ramfs image
        hh editimg host:/srv/ironhide/mp/uInitramfs
         (opens new shell inside the unpacked image)

        hh editimg host:/srv/ironhide/mp/uInitramfs,/etc/xen/domd.cfg
         (opens domd.cfg in your editor)

    Interactively edit the DTB
        hh editimg host:/srv/ironhide/mp/xen.dtb
        Note: Decompiled dts is saved in cache to preserve
        comments/formatting/broken code/etc

The main actions are edit, build, deploy, info and editimg(interactive). Edit opens the project source in the preferred editor. Build builds the project (runs the do_compile/install/deploy scripts). Deploy copies the built project to the target. Info prints relevant project information, such as source/work/deploy dirs and used recipes. Editimg downloads/unpacks the specified image and lets you edit it by hand.

Each command accepts the domain and the project name as arguments. Domain is only relevant for Moulin projects with multiple domains. For HH to be able to find the correct project, you need to run it from somewhere inside the yocto or moulin root directory.

Targets for deploy:

• Local/remote directory
• Local/remote ext4 image
• Local/remote initrd image

Configuration

HighHeat searches for the configuration file in the following order:

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/.config/highheat.yaml
$HOME/.config/highheat.yaml
./highheat.yaml

Sample configuration:

editor: code # Preferred editor
interacve_editor: code -w # Editor for interactive editing, needs to not exit immediately(use wait flags for the GUI ones)
confirm: True # Confirm before running shell commands
dl_dir: ~/.cache/highheat # Persistent downloads directory
dldir_cleanup_interval: 7 # Days between cleanup of old downloads
complevel: 9 # Compression level for gzip