RECC client

RECC is the Remote Execution Caching Compiler, an open source build tool that wraps compiler command calls and forwards them to a remote build execution service using the remote execution API (REAPI) v2.

Note

There is no stable release of RECC yet. You’ll have to install it from sources.

Configuration

RECC reads the configuration from its execution environment. You can get a complete list of environment variables it accepts by running:

recc --help

The variables are prefixed with RECC_. The most important ones for remote execution are:

  • RECC_SERVER: URI of the remote execution server.

  • RECC_CAS_SERVER: URI of the CAS server, defaults to RECC_SERVER.

  • RECC_INSTANCE: name of the remote execution instance.

Hint

RECC_VERBOSE=1 can be set in order to enable verbose output.

As an example, in order to forward compile commands to the main instance of the remote execution server available at controller.grid.build on port 50051 you should export:

export RECC_SERVER=controller.grid.build:50051
export RECC_INSTANCE=main

Example build

RECC can be use with any existing software package respecting GNU make common variables like CC for the C compiler or CXX for the C++ compiler. We’ll focus here on instructions on how to build the GNU Hello example program using RECC and BuildGrid on your local machine.

First, you need to download the hello source package:

wget https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/hello/hello-2.10.tar.gz

Next, unpack it and change the current directory to the source root:

tar xvf hello-2.10.tar.gz
cd hello-2.10

Hint

All the commands in the instructions below are expected to be executed from that root source directory (the GNU Hello project’s root directory).

Before trying to build the hello example program, you’ll have to setup and run a BuildGrid server and bot. A minimal server’s configuration is given below, paste it in a server.yml file in the root directory:

server:
  - !channel
    address: localhost:50051
    insecure-mode: true

instances:
  - name: main

    storages:
      - !lru-storage &main-storage
        size: 512MB

    services:
      - !action-cache &main-action
        storage: *main-storage
        max-cached-refs: 256
        allow-updates: true

      - !execution
        storage: *main-storage
        action-cache: *main-action

      - !cas
        storage: *main-storage

      - !bytestream
        storage: *main-storage

This defines a single main server instance implementing a ContentAddressableStorage (CAS) + ByteStream service together with an Execution + ActionCache service, both using the same in-memory storage. You can then start the BuildGrid server daemon using that configuration by running:

bgd server start server.yml

In order to perform the actual build work, you need to attach a worker bot to that server for that main instance. Once you’ve make sure that your machine has gcc installed, run:

buildbox-casd --cas-remote=http://localhost:50051 --bind=127.0.0.1:50011 ~/casd &
buildbox-worker --buildbox-run=buildbox-run-hosttools --bots-remote=http://localhost:50051 \
   --cas-remote=http://127.0.0.1:50011 --request-timeout=30 my_bot

The BuildGrid server is now ready to accept jobs and execute them. RECC’s configuration needs to be defined as environment variables. Define minimal configuration by running:

export RECC_SERVER=localhost:50051
export RECC_INSTANCE=main

This points RECC to the main remote execution server instance at localhost:50051.

GNU Hello is using The Autotools as a build system, so first, you need to configure your build. Run:

./configure

You can finally build the hello example program, using RECC by running:

make CC="recc cc"

You can verify that the example program has been successfully built by running the generated executable. Simply invoke:

./hello

Verifying caching

You can check the caching functionality of BuildGrid using RECC by rebuilding the same files. Clean up your local directory first:

make clean

You can then run the build again using RECC as before:

make CC="recc cc"

This build should hit the ActionCache rather than actually doing any compilation. You can check that happened by looking in the server logs, which should only mention access to the ActionCache and no execution.

In general, you can also set RECC_VERBOSE=1 to get verbose output from RECC, which will contain information about whether or not a cache hit was found.

You can also use the casdownload command line tool to get the Action result from the cache to manually inspect it to ensure it is as expected. See the casdownload README for details on doing that.