Open Build Service
| Company type | Open source project |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software development, Build automation |
Area served | Worldwide |
| Products | Software package building and distribution platform |
| Owner | SUSE (previously known as openSUSE Build Service) |
| Parent | SUSE |
| Website | build |
Overview
The Open Build Service (previously known as openSUSE Build Service) is a versatile, open platform designed for distribution development. It empowers developers to compile software packages compatible with a variety of Linux distributions, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, openSUSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and Arch Linux. By simplifying the packaging workflow, it allows a single application to be prepared for numerous distributions and different openSUSE versions, thus broadening the range of available packages regardless of the user's chosen distribution. In addition to packaging, OBS facilitates the creation of products and appliances.
Distributed under the terms of the GPL, the platform has earned recognition from the Linux Foundation, which incorporated it into the Linux Developer Network (LDN) in acknowledgment of its significance to the Linux community at large. Various enterprises and projects such as MeeGo and Tizen rely on OBS for their distribution development processes.
Moreover, OBS offers a collaborative framework where teams of developers can coordinate builds and submit modifications across multiple projects.
Workflow and usage
The Open Build Service can be deployed privately or accessed through public instances like SUSE’s openSUSE Build Service available at build.opensuse.org. The public instance provides up to 400 concurrent build slots but may impose limitations on certain package categories, making private deployments more suitable for proprietary or legally restricted software.
Each contributor is assigned a default "home" project, which serves as the repository for uploading source files and build instructions for RPM or Debian packages. Users with appropriate rights can also contribute changes outside their home projects. Upon each upload, the service queues package rebuilds and promptly publishes the resulting binaries to a download server accessible to the public.
OBS offers a publicly accessible API that can be utilized via multiple interfaces:
- A web-based interface hosted at build.opensuse.org
- A command line interface tool
Furthermore, integration plugins are available for popular development environments such as Eclipse and Qt Creator, streamlining workflows and boosting developer efficiency.
Instances may be interconnected to share sources and packages from remote servers, thereby avoiding manual dependency imports or bootstrapping efforts when managing existing projects.