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dbuild

What is dbuild?

dbuild is the primary build engine for the Daemonless project. It provides a unified interface for building, testing, and publishing FreeBSD OCI container images, ensuring consistency between local development and CI/CD environments.

It bridges the gap between modern OCI image standards and native FreeBSD Jails. By handling the complexity of ocijail, networking, and jail annotations automatically, dbuild allows you to focus on your application logic rather than system administration.

FreeBSD Port

dbuild is available as a native FreeBSD port: sysutils/py-dbuild.

The Lifecycle

dbuild manages the entire journey of a container image through three main phases:

  1. Build: Automatically detects Containerfile variants and builds native FreeBSD images using Podman.
  2. Test: Executes Quality Gates (CIT) to validate port bindings, health endpoints, and visual regressions.
  3. Publish: Handles multi-arch tagging, registry authentication, and SBOM generation.

Key Features

  • Multi-variant builds: Automatically detects Containerfile and Containerfile.<variant> (e.g. .pkg).
  • Architecture awareness: Maps standard names (x86_64, arm64) to FreeBSD conventions (amd64, aarch64).
  • Quality Gates: Integrated testing that blocks registry pushes if validation fails.
  • Documentation Automation: Renders README.md and Containerfile from compose.yaml metadata.
  • CI First: Designed to run identically on local machines, GitHub Actions, and Woodpecker CI.

Installation

dbuild requires Python 3.11+ and Podman.

# Install dbuild from source
git clone https://github.com/daemonless/dbuild
cd dbuild
doas make install

Quick Start

Jump straight into building your first FreeBSD container image:

Build and push all variants 

dbuild build --push

Initialize from a FreeBSD Port 

dbuild init --freebsd-port net-p2p/transmission

Run specific tests 

dbuild test --variant pkg

Next Steps