Open Build Service (OBS), an open source system to build and distribute binary packages from source code, is now available in version 2.10. After a year in the works, the openSUSE-nurtured project now comes with better container support and GitLab integration amongst other things.

The work on the former is only reasonable, given the burgeoning interest in containers as a means of shipping and deploying. To help with delivery, OBS 2.10 comes with an integrated registry that can be built into a release workflow. It also makes use of binary tracking, so that ops can get the full insight into who has shipped what when. Improved parsing of Dockerfiles, container layer deduplication and support for multi-arch container manifest generation should help spark interest in the containerisation community as well.

With GitHub now part of Microsoft, some organisations have turned to open source alternatives like GitLab or more rarely Pagure. Taking this development into account, the OBS team has extended its support to those project hosting tools, so that events on these platforms can be used to trigger OBS actions. Performance metrics can now be collected with InfluxDB if needed and there are ways to upload packages to Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure cloud.

Mainly to improve maintainability and update the look and feel of the project’s interface on mobile devices, the developers also reworked OBS’ user interface. Under the hood this was primarily done by moving away from the old technology stack which was mainly made up of custom CSS, a JQuery UI theme, and the 960 Grid System. The new one uses the Bootstrap framework originally developed at Twitter. 

Thanks to the team sharing their progress along the way and collecting feedback after every migration stage, it shouldn’t feel too different to users already familiar with the service. Other UI improvements include a refactoring of the binaries page, so that it now offers functions to directly download files and upload images. Moreover, the interface now hides disabled repositories and excluded entries in package build results by default, and limits the results for autocompletion queries to 50.

In the meantime, the backend saw the addition of support for Vagrant box publishing and zchunk compressed files in rpm-md metadata. A complete list of changes can be found in the release notes, which are part of the project’s GitHub repository. The project code is licensed under the GPL.