In my previous posts, I demonstrated how to build a statically linked transmission-daemon with Buildah. People are asking how to build it for ARM, and I realized they don’t know that with Buildah and qemu-user-static, you can build for almost any architecture on x86_64. In this post, I will demonstrate how to build for ARM64 and make your own custom build with the scripts in my repository.
Prerequisites
As the build process is based on Buildah, you will only need to have Buildah, Git, and qemu-user-static installed on your system. Since they are readily available in most Linux distributions, I am not going to cover how to install them on your choice of Linux distribution. The qemu-user-static is required to build ARM64 binaries on an x86_64 system.
Clone the Repository
git clone https://github.com/deamen/transmission-builder.git
Build the transmission-daemon Binary for ARM64
cd transmission-builder/transmission-daemon
export TRANSMISSION_VERSION=4.0.5
./build_transmission-daemon.sh arm64
Building for ARM64 this way will take much longer than cross-compiling on AMD64. The build time is 29 minutes, while the AMD64 build only takes 3 minutes on a free GitHub standard runner. However, I think the simplicity of the build process is worth the wait, and if you are building on a modern machine, the build time will be much shorter.
Build the transmission-daemon Binary for AMD64
cd transmission-builder/transmission-daemon
export TRANSMISSION_VERSION=4.0.5
./build_transmission-daemon.sh amd64
Build the transmission-daemon Binary for armv7
cd transmission-builder/transmission-daemon
export TRANSMISSION_VERSION=4.0.5
./build_transmission-daemon.sh arm
Build the transmission-daemon Binary for i386
cd transmission-builder/transmission-daemon
export TRANSMISSION_VERSION=4.0.5
./build_transmission-daemon.sh i386
Make Your Own Custom Build
The build happens in a container, and the container is built from the container image defined in the transmission-builder/transmission-daemon/Containerfile.transmission file.
You can change the CMake options to suit your needs. For example, to enable building the CLI, you will need to set -DENABLE_CLI=ON. However, any changes to the CMake options will require you to figure out the library dependencies and possibly patch the relevant CMakeLists.txt files.
Manual Build in the Container
On a successful build, the container will be removed, but the image is preserved for future customization.
You can make your custom build in a container interactively, then make your changes to the container file once everything is working. I would suggest you have Podman installed for this purpose, so you can run the container interactively with the following command:
podman run --rm -it $image_id /bin/sh