Bitbake

BitBake is a generic task execution engine that allows shell and Python tasks to be run efficiently and in parallel while working within complex inter-task dependency constraints. One of BitBake's main users, OpenEmbedded, takes this core and builds embedded Linux software stacks using a task-oriented approach.

For information about Bitbake, see the OpenEmbedded website: https://www.openembedded.org/

Bitbake plain documentation can be found under the doc directory or its integrated html version at the Yocto Project website: https://docs.yoctoproject.org

Bitbake requires Python version 3.8 or newer.

Contributing

Please refer to our contributor guide here: https://docs.yoctoproject.org/contributor-guide/ for full details on how to submit changes.

As a quick guide, patches should be sent to bitbake-devel@lists.openembedded.org The git command to do that would be:

git send-email -M -1 --to bitbake-devel@lists.openembedded.org

If you're sending a patch related to the BitBake manual, make sure you copy the Yocto Project documentation mailing list:

git send-email -M -1 --to bitbake-devel@lists.openembedded.org --cc docs@lists.yoctoproject.org

Mailing list:

https://lists.openembedded.org/g/bitbake-devel

Source code:

https://git.openembedded.org/bitbake/

Testing

Bitbake has a testsuite located in lib/bb/tests/ whichs aim to try and prevent regressions. You can run this with "bitbake-selftest". In particular the fetcher is well covered since it has so many corner cases. The datastore has many tests too. Testing with the testsuite is recommended before submitting patches, particularly to the fetcher and datastore. We also appreciate new test cases and may require them for more obscure issues.

To run the tests "zstd" and "git" must be installed.

The assumption is made that this testsuite is run from an initialized OpenEmbedded build environment (i.e. source oe-init-build-env is used). If this is not the case, run the testsuite as follows:

export PATH=$(pwd)/bin:$PATH
bin/bitbake-selftest

The testsuite can alternatively be executed using pytest, e.g. obtained from PyPI (in this case, the PATH is configured automatically):

pytest