Including Programs in Redox

(Before reading this page you must read the Build System page)

This page will teach you how to add programs on the Redox image, it's a simplified version of the Porting Applications using Recipes page.

The Cookbook system makes the packaging process very simple. First, we will show how to add an existing program for inclusion. Then we will show how to create a new program to be included. In Coding and Building, we discuss the development cycle in more detail.

Existing Package

Redox has many programs that are available for inclusion. Each program has a recipe in the directory cookbook/recipes/recipe-name. Adding an existing program to your build is as simple as adding it to config/$ARCH/myfiles.toml, or whatever name you choose for your .toml configuration definition. Here we will add the games package, which contains several terminal games.

Setup the Redox Build Environment

  • Follow the steps in Building Redox or Podman Build to create the Redox Build Environment on your system.
  • Build the system as described. This will take quite a while the first time.
  • Run the system in QEMU.
cd ~/tryredox/redox

make qemu

Assuming you built the default configuration desktop for x86_64, none of the Redox games (e.g. /usr/bin/minesweeper) have been included yet.

  • On your Redox emulation, log into the system as user user with an empty password.
  • Open a Terminal window by clicking on the icon in the toolbar at the bottom of the Redox screen, and type ls /usr/bin. You will see that minesweeper is not listed.
  • Type Ctrl-Alt-G to regain control of your cursor, and click the upper right corner of the Redox window to exit QEMU.

Setup your Configuration

Read the Configuration Settings page and follow the commands below.

  • From your redox base directory, copy an existing configuration and edit it.
cd ~/tryredox/redox

cp config/x86_64/desktop.toml config/x86_64/myfiles.toml

nano config/x86_64/myfiles.toml
  • Look for the [packages] secion and add the package to the configuration. You can add the package anywhere in the [packages] section, but by convention, we add them to the end or to an existing related area of the section.
...
[packages]
# Add the item below under the "[packages]" section
redox-games = {}
...
  • Add the CONFIG_NAME environment variable on your .config to use the myfiles.toml configuration.
nano .config

# Add the item below
CONFIG_NAME?=myfiles
  • Save your changes with Ctrl+X and confirm with y

Build the System

  • In your base redox folder, e.g. ~/tryredox/redox, build the system and run it in QEMU.
cd ~/tryredox/redox

make all

make qemu

Or

cd ~/tryredox/redox

make all qemu
  • On your Redox emulation, log into the system as user user with an empty password.
  • Open a Terminal window by clicking it on the icon in the toolbar at the bottom of the Redox screen, and type ls /usr/bin. You will see that minesweeper is listed.
  • In the terminal window, type minesweeper. Play the game using the arrow keys or WSAD,space to reveal a spot, f to flag a spot when you suspect a mine is present. When you type f, an F character will appear.

If you had a problem, use this command to log any possible errors on your terminal output:

make r.recipe-name 2>&1 | tee recipe-name.log

And that's it! Sort of.

Dependencies

Read this section to learn how to handle recipe dependencies.

Update crates

Read this to learn how to update crates on Rust programs.

Modifying an Existing Recipe

If you want to make changes to an existing recipe for your own purposes, you can do your work in the directory cookbook/recipes/recipe-name/source. The Cookbook process will not download sources if they are already present in that folder. However, if you intend to do significant work or to contribute changes to Redox, please read the Coding and Building page.

Create Your Own Hello World

To create your own program to be included, you will need to create the recipe. This example walks through adding the "Hello World" program that the cargo new command automatically generates to the folder of a Rust project.

This process is largely the same for other Rust programs.

Setting Up The Recipe

The Cookbook will only build programs that have a recipe defined in cookbook/recipes. To create a recipe for the Hello World program, first create the directory cookbook/recipes/hello-world. Inside this directory create the "recipe.toml" file and add these lines to it:

[build]
template = "cargo"

The [build] section defines how Cookbook should build our project. There are several templates but "cargo" should be used for Rust projects.

The [source] section of the recipe tells Cookbook how to download the Git repository/tarball of the program.

This is done if cookbook/recipes/recipe-name/source does not exist, during make fetch or during the fetch step of make all. For this example, we will simply develop in the source directory, so no [source] section is necessary.

Writing the program

Since this is a Hello World example, we are going to have Cargo write the code for us. In cookbook/recipes/hello-world, do the following:

mkdir source

cd source

cargo init --name="hello-world"

This creates a Cargo.toml file and a src directory with the Hello World program.

Adding the program to the Redox image

To be able to run a program inside of Redox, it must be added to the filesystem. As above, create a filesystem config config/x86_64/myfiles.toml or similar by copying an existing configuration, and modify CONFIG_NAME in .config to be myfiles. Open config/x86_64/myfiles.toml and add hello-world = {} below the [packages] section.

During the creation of the Redox image, the build system installs those packages on the image filesystem.

[packages]
# Add the item below
hello-world = {}

To build the Redox image, including your program, run the following commands:

cd ~/tryredox/redox

make r.hello-world image

Running your program

Once the rebuild is finished, run make qemu, and when the GUI starts, log in to Redox, open the terminal, and run helloworld. It should print

Hello, world!

Note that the hello-world binary can be found in /usr/bin on Redox.