Introduction

cpk stands for Code Packaging toolKit and is designed to standardize the way code in a project is structured and packaged for maximum portability, readability and maintainability.

cpk is the result of years of experience in the context of cross-user, cross-machine, cross-architecture development and deployment of software modules. Originally created to standardize and simplify code development and deployment in Duckietown, it later became an independent toolkit.

Features

cpk organizes code in projects. A cpk project is a directory containing everything that is needed for the project to be built, packaged, documented and deployed.

The power of cpk comes from the technologies it is built on:

  • Python (for cross-platform availability);

  • Git (for code versioning);

  • Catkin (for source code packaging and dependencies management);

  • Docker (for code packaging and deployment);

  • QEMU (for cross-platform code building and deployment);

  • SSH (for fast and secure communication between build and deployment nodes);

  • rsync (for reliable code synchronization);

The next two sections will jump straight into how to install cpk, then build and run a simple cpk project. Don’t miss them.

Installation

You can install cpk through pip.

$ pip3 install cpk

Get Started

We will now create, build and run an empty project, we will then take a step back and examine how to populate the project with your own code.

Create an empty project

Use the following command to create an empty cpk project.

$ cpk create ./my_project

You will be asked to provide information about your new project. For example,

cpk|    INFO : Please, provide information about your new project:
   |
   |        Project Name:           my_project
   |        Project Description:    My best project
   |        Owner Username:         afdaniele
   |        Owner Full Name:        Andrea Daniele

Build the project

Now that our empty project is created, let’s build it.

$ cd ./my_project
$ cpk build

Let it build and you will see a summary of the build that looks like the following,

...
====================================================================================
Final image name: afdaniele/my_project:latest-amd64
Base image size: 120.25 MB
Final image size: 120.25 MB
Your image added 1.08 KB to the base image.
-------------------------
Layers total: 48
 - Built: 48
 - Cached: 0
-------------------------
Image launchers:
 - default
-------------------------
Time: 5 seconds
Documentation: Skipped
====================================================================================

This means that the project was built successfully, now let’s run it.

Run the project

$ cpk run

You will see the following output,

...
==> Entrypoint
<== Entrypoint
This is an empty launch script. Update it to launch your application.

This means that our project run correctly. Congratulations, you just built and run your first cpk project.

The following sections will teach you how to,