Building

There are a couple of supported ways to build a Blueprint and a collection of Components and Transforms with the HELIX CLI. Namely, you can specify a configuration via command line arguments or you can generate a build from a JSON configuration file.

Building with CLI Arguments

A simple example (given elsewhere in this documentation) builds the cmake-cpp Blueprint with the configuration-example Component and the strip Transform and writes the output to ./example:

helix build blueprint cmake-cpp ./example \
    -c configuration-example:second_word=foo \
    -t strip

It is also possible to specify multiple components and transforms to generate an arbitrarily complex build. For example, using some of HELIX’s built-in Components and Transforms, we can generate a build that:

1. Downloads a remove file (https://www.google.com/).

2. Compresses the file using zlib.

3. Encrypts the compressed file with aes and a fixed key.

4. Deletes the unencrypted file.

5. Deletes the uncompressed file.

6. Timestomps the compressed, encrypted download.

We can then strip and UPX compress this build, all using only built-in HELIX Components and Transforms:

helix build blueprint cmake-cpp example \
    -c linux-libcurl-remote-file-copy:url=https://www.google.com/,output=test.txt \
       linux-zlib-compress-data-compressed:input=test.txt,output=test.txt.gz \
       linux-openssl-aes-encrypt-data-encrypted:input=test.txt.gz,output=test.txt.gz.enc,key=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdef \
       linux-remove-file-deletion:path=test.txt \
       linux-remove-file-deletion:path=test.txt.gz \
       linux-utime-timestomp:path=test.txt.gz.enc,timestamp="2010-01-01 12:00:00" \
    -t strip upx

Building from JSON Configuration

The HELIX CLI can also take configuration from a JSON file. For example, we can build the following configuration:

{
    "name": "example",
    "blueprint": {"name": "cmake-cpp"},
    "components": [
        {
            "name": "minimal-example",
            "configuration": {}
        },
        {
            "name": "configuration-example",
            "configuration": {
                "second_word": "example"
            }
        }
    ],
    "transforms": [
        {
            "name": "replace-example",
            "configuration": {
                "old": "hello",
                "new": "goodbye"
            }
        },
        {
            "name": "strip"
        }
    ]
}

by running the following command:

helix build json configuration.json ./example

External Components

The build commands also support loading Components from external sources and downstream libraries using the helix.component.Loader interface.