With the help of the following tool you can

• compile syslog-ng from source code
• generate tarball (snapshot / release)
• create OS specific packages

in an isolated Docker container based environment.

whoami@host:~/syslog-ng$ dbld/rules [help]

dbld/rules is the general entrypoint for the tool, specifying multiple targets. For the complete list of the available targets please run the command (without parameters it will run without any side effect), or read the source code on GitHub.

Almost every dbld/rules command runs in a Docker container. You can use the pre-built containers from GitHub or build your own images with the dbld/rules image-<os> command.

The source code and build products are mounted externally in the following locations:

• /source -> syslog-ng/*
• /dbld -> syslog-ng/dbld
• /build -> syslog-ng/dbld/build
• /install -> syslog-ng/dbld/install

$ dbld/rules tarball
$ Your tarball is in /build, also available on the host in $(top_srcdir)/dbld/build
$ cd dbld/build
$ tar -xzvf syslog-ng*.tar.gz
$ ./syslog-ng-*/configure
$ make

You can also build a DEB using:

$ dbld/rules deb-ubuntu-focal

You can find the resulting debs in $HOME/syslog-ng/dbld/build.

You can also use the docker based shell to hack on syslog-ng by configuring and building manually. You can use any of the supported OSes as shells (e.g. shell-ubuntu-noble or shell-almalinux-8) and there's "devshell" that contains a few extra tools, often needed during development.

Steps for the manual build after entering into the containers shell:

$ ./dbld/rules shell-devshell

# inside the container
$ cd /source/
# autogen.sh generates the configure script using autotools, you could also
# use cmake (alternative build system, experimental) here.
$ ./autogen.sh
$ cd /build/
# run the configure script, there's a wrapper for this in /dbld/bootstrap
# that will include extra options exported by dbld/rules.
$ /source/configure --enable-debug --prefix=/install
$ make
$ make check
$ make install

If the compilation and installation was successful you can run syslog-ng with the following command:

$ /install/syslog-ng/sbin/syslog-ng -Fedv

The dbld tools also allow to prepare for a syslog-ng release. By default, when you generate a tarball/deb/rpm, dbld would generate a "snapshot" version (including a git commit id) to avoid mismatching it with a "real" release.

If you instead want to do an "official-looking" release (e.g. 3.28.1 instead of 3.27.1.34.g83096fa.dirty), this is the procedure you have to follow. The syslog-ng team is using this to perform releases.

First of all, you will need to commit a patch that bumps the version number in a couple of places (e.g. the VERSION file in the root directory).

Start with a git commit that you want to release (e.g the master branch), with no local changes.

Version bumps are automated using the "prepare-release" target of dbld that can be invoked like this:

$ ./dbld/rules prepare-release VERSION=3.28.1

To see what prepare-release does automatically consult the script dbld/prepare-release in the source tree.

prepare-release does not commit the changes, rather it leaves them for you to review and then commit.

Once the versions are bumped, that change is committed, the source tree is prepared for a release. You can do it via:

$ ./dbld/rules release VERSION=3.28.1

This will build:

• a tarball,
• automatically generates an up-to-date rpm/debian packaging,
• build rpm/deb packages on their default platform
• tag the current commit in git

All artifacts (tarball, deb/rpm packages) are stored in ./dbld/release/<VERSION>

The script does not undertake publishing the artifacts or the tag in any way. It is expected that some kind of CI system will perform this (jenkins, travis, github-actions).