Build Kit Locally

Skill: Build and Publish Kit

Purpose

Build a Bottlerocket kit (core-kit or kernel-kit) and publish it to a local OCI registry for development testing and validation. This allows you to test kit changes in variant builds without publishing to production registries.

When to Use

• Making changes to kit packages and testing them in variants
• Iterative development on kits
• Before building a variant image that depends on kit changes

Prerequisites

• Docker installed and running
• Working from within a grove directory
• Kit repository cloned in kits/ directory

Procedure

1. Ensure local registry is running

brdev registry start

2. Configure for local registry

cd kits/<kit-name>
brdev twoliter use-local-publish

This creates Infra.toml pointing to the local registry for publishing.

3. Build the kit

make build

For specific architecture:

make build ARCH=x86_64
# or
make build ARCH=aarch64

4. Publish to local registry

make publish VENDOR=local

This publishes the kit to localhost:5000 with the vendor prefix "local".

5. Verify publication

brdev registry list

Should show your kit in the repositories list.

Validation

Check the kit is available:

brdev registry list

Should return the published version tags.

Common Issues

Registry not running:

Error: connection refused

Solution: Run brdev registry start

Infra.toml not configured:

Error: vendor 'local' not found

Solution: Run brdev twoliter use-local-publish to create the configuration

Docker permission denied: Solution: Ensure user is in docker group and Docker daemon is running

Next Steps

After publishing a kit:

1. Update variant's Twoliter.toml to reference the new kit version
2. Run make update in the variant repo
3. Build the variant with cargo make