BUILD.rst

Guide to building Portable PyPy yourself

You are going to need Docker installed. I used docker 1.6 on Fedora to accomplish this.

All the commands are executed from the repository root.

First build a base image containging basic headers and up to date multilib GCC

docker build -t portable-pypy image

Next we need to build all the up to date dependencies that pypy needs like OpenSSL, libffi etc. We are gonna need to build CPython to translate PyPy as well, you might think I could reuse Portably PyPy to translate PyPy but there are some problems with that, mainly because PyPy uses host Python to find out availability of some function inside os module. So if there is a version that introduces new symbols they might be not there yet.

From now on we are gonna use environment variable ABI set to either 32 or 64 to choose the either i686 or x86_64 builds. For the purpose of this guide I am only gonna build 64 bit Portable PyPy.

The commands put all the source files into src64 directory and all the build artifacts into prefix64 directory relative to current working directory.

docker run --rm `ABI=64 ./runopt.sh` portable-pypy ./build_deps

Now we are ready to translate PyPy, the last parameter is the branch name or commit hash in the PyPy Bitbucket repository. Let's build PyPy 2.6:

docker run --rm `ABI=64 ./runopt.sh` portable-pypy ./build release-2.6.0

This will take some time, around 90 minutes on modern hardware with enough RAM.

After obtaining the binary we need build cffi modules, bundle needed shared objects and virtualenv, patch it to make it relocatable and package all together.

docker run --rm `ABI=64 ./runopt.sh` portable-pypy ./package release-2.6.0

You will see a line like: using pypy-2.6-linux_x86_64-portable at the end. This leaves with a final tarball src64/pypy-2.6-linux_x86_64-portale.tar.bz2 and you are done.