This repository is the starting point for 3rd party developers looking to deploy their applications as containers in the Westermo WeOS operating system.

In order for developers to easily access Westermo specific features it is recommended that your application, just like app-demo, is built on top of NetBox, which is where all such features and patches to any Open Source package are published.

NetBox extends Buildroot to provide a solid build system and recipes for building thousands of open source packages, handling all intricacies of dependency management, cross-compilation etc. All these packages are available for use in both NetBox and app-demo.

The app-demo project is layered on top of NetBox, the same way NetBox is layered on top of Buildroot, using the Buildroot External Tree facility.

Like NetBox, this project supports the following Westermo platforms out of the box, other variants are possible, but require custom setup:

The following table list each available application demo, with links to the README of each demo and quick-links to the latest build for each of the supported platforms. The same builds are also available directly from the Actions tab on the GitHub project.

The default login credentials for all demo apps are root without any password. To enable remote login using SSH, you need to set a password or configure the Dropbear SSH daemon to allow blank passwords. Another possibility is to user SSH keys.

Note: Currently the nightly builds and defconfigs available here target only the Coronet, Dagger and Zero platforms. Other platforms will be supported later. For details, see the NetBox project.

The Buildroot Manual is very comprehensive and a great resource for learning about the build system. In addition, running make help in the app-demo root directory will show a summary of the most commonly used commands.

In order to build a container image, the repository must first be configured. To list the available configuration targets, run

make list-defconfigs

To select, for example, the backbone demo, run

make backbone_coronet_defconfig

A curses based configuration interface can be summoned with make menuconfig to select any additional packages to build.

Finally we can build the image using make. Expect an initial build to take around 15 minutes on a reasonably modern machine; subsequent incremental builds are much faster.

Once the build has completed, your application image is available in output/images/rootfs.squashfs.

The app-demo project follows the Example layout proposed in the Buildroot manual.

• board/demo/${TARGET}: Customizations for each target
• configs/: Default configurations
• netbox/: Git submodule pointing to the netbox repo which in turn contains a submodule reference to Buildroot
• output/: All generated artifacts are stored in this here
• package/: Recipes for building some piece of software, either by downloading a tarball or by referencing a directory in src/
• src/: Source code for sample applications developed by Westermo

This is an example of how an external Buildroot tree can be set up and structured, most of it can be changed to better suit the needs of both the developer and organization, if required. In fact, WeOS makes no assumptions on the application container even using Buildroot at all; you are free to use any build system as long as the result is a SquashFS image containing an executable /sbin/init which is compatible with the target architecture.