Travis

Permanent link to this article HOWTO: Submit a package to AUR | Travis' Blog, welcome to check it out.

Recently, I discovered gptcommit, a small tool written in Rust that uses gpt to generate commit messages. The basic idea is to pass the output of git diff to gpt, allowing it to generate text that can be used as commit messages. It's perfect for lazy people like me. Humans are really lazy to the point of taking off😂

There is a package called gptcommit-git on the Arch User Repository (AUR), but the version is stuck at 0.1.16. I think there might be some issues with the PKGBUILD file, which requires manual updates frequently. Since there is no gptcommit-bin in AUR either, and for the convenience of future one-click updates with yay -Syu, I'm planning to create and upload my own package. It's also a small contribution to the community ☺.

First, I'll search the most authoritative Arch Wiki to see how to properly write a package and upload it. I'll also refer to the Arch Packaging Guidelines¹ and Arch Submission Guidelines², and ask ChatGPT for some advice.

The author of gptcommit provides pre-compiled binary files for various platforms in the release section. We just need to download and extract them to the /usr/bin directory. It's a simple packaging process. Here's the PKGBUILD file I wrote. After writing it, I can generate a tarball in the current directory by using the makepkg -Acs command, and then install it with sudo pacman -U <tarball>pkg.tar.zst.

# Maintainer: travismtg <[email protected]>

pkgname=gptcommit-bin
pkgver=0.5.8
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="A git prepare-commit-msg hook for authoring commit messages with GPT-3."
arch=('any')
url='https://github.com/zurawiki/gptcommit'
license=('MIT')
depends=()
conflicts=('gptcommit-git' 'gptcommit')
source=('https://github.com/zurawiki/gptcommit/releases/download/v0.5.8/gptcommit-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz')
sha256sums=('d0efe345dd4b598a8c06bd9ba7036ae4e148141deb606c64e612e8959273cedc')

package() {
cd "$srcdir"
    mkdir -p "$pkgdir/usr/bin/"
tar zxvf gptcommit-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz -C "$pkgdir/usr/bin/"
}

After verifying that the installation is successful, I can prepare for the upload.

1. First, I'll register an AUR account and set up my SSH public key to prove my identity.
2. Then, I can create a new repository by cloning it directly using git clone ssh://[email protected]/gptcommit-bin.git (Yes, cloning directly creates a repository).
3. Next, I'll put the PKGBUILD file I just wrote into the repository and use makepkg --printsrcinfo > .SRCINFO to generate the package's basic information file.
4. git add PKGBUILD .SRCINFO && git commit -m "v0.5.8"
5. git push --set-upstream origin master to push to the remote repository.

Now I can see that the package I published, gptcommit-bin, is visible on the website. But since I'm already doing this, I might as well automate it a bit more and let it update itself whenever there's a new version. It's quite tiring to manually modify the version number, download URL, and sha256 information every time there's a new version.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Created by travismtg
# Thu Apr 27 11:08:31 PM CST 2023
# usage: ./update.sh /path/to/pkg

DES=$1 # directory that contains the PKGBUILD file
cd $DES

VERSION_URL=`curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/zurawiki/gptcommit/releases/latest |\
    jq -r '.tag_name as $version | .assets[] | select(.name | contains("linux-gnu")) | $version + " " + .browser_download_url'`

VERSION=$(echo $VERSION_URL | cut -d' ' -f1 | sed 's/v//')
CURRENT_VERSION=$(grep 'pkgver=' PKGBUILD | sed 's/pkgver=//')
echo latest version is $VERSION
echo current version is $CURRENT_VERSION

if [[ $VERSION == $CURRENT_VERSION ]]; then
    echo exit
    exit
fi

URL=`echo $VERSION_URL | cut -d' ' -f2`
POSTURL=$(echo $URL | sed 's/\//\\\//g')

TARGET=$(echo $URL | grep -o 'gptcommit-x86.*tar.gz')
wget $URL -O $TARGET
SUM=$(sha256sum $TARGET | cut -f1 -d' ')

sed -i 's/^source=(.*)/source=('"'"$POSTURL"'"')/' PKGBUILD
sed -i 's/^sha256sums=(.*)/sha256sums=('"'"$SUM"'"')/' PKGBUILD
sed -i 's/^pkgver=.*/pkgver='$VERSION'/' PKGBUILD

makepkg --printsrcinfo > .SRCINFO

# commit and push
git add PKGBUILD .SRCINFO
git commit -m "$VERSION"
git push

Now I only need to run ./update.sh /path/to/pkg to update the package files. I'll put these files on the server and set up a crontab to check for version updates every day at 10 AM. This way, the gptcommit package will be automatically updated.

That's the end of this article. My biggest takeaway from this process is that ChatGPT is really useful. I just need to ask it how to get the latest release of a GitHub repository and filter out the download link for Linux, and it quickly finds the GitHub API and writes the jq rules for me. Of course, I could have figured out these things by myself by reading the documentation or Googling, but ChatGPT compresses the time it takes to acquire knowledge and can personalize the information I want. This tireless teacher is amazing.