Basics¶
Concepts¶
Each new sandboxed environment is referred to as a dram.
The environment variable DRAM_ROOT is the root directory where all drams
are kept. Each dram is a subdirectory.
Warning
Root privileges should generally not be necessary to install anything into
a dram. Avoid the temptation to use sudo. You may wish to consider
changing the ownership of your /usr/local directory to root in order to
prevent any dram usage from “spilling” into the global environment.
Dram Types¶
- Plain drams are intended for installing most open source “directly”, via
a
./configurescript or similar mechanism. They are not populated with any initial files or directories, but set up environment variables that will - Plain-with-python drams are the same as Plain drams with the addition of an integrated python virtual environment for the dram.
- Homebrew drams populate an instance of Homebrew.
- Macports drams populate an instance of MacPorts.
Command-Line Usage¶
Dram includes a command-line utility which is the expected entry point for most usage. Some examples are below. You can also see the utility itself for more info:
$ dram help
Creating a New Dram¶
This will create a new dram you can then install stuff into.:
$ dram create example
To create a dram of a particular type:
$ dram create -t macports example
When creating a dram of type plain-with-python you can also pass the
-p and --system-site-packages flags and they will be passed through
to the virtual environement when it is created for that dram.
Using The Dram¶
Creating a dram automatically switches to it, but if you want to switch to an already created dram:
$ dram use example
Note that if you have set the DRAM_AUTO_CDSOURCE environment variable, then dram will automatically
switch to the source directory of the activated dram whenever you do dram use <dram name>
Dram includes wrappers around common build tools (autotools and cmake) to ease installing software into the dram.
Installing Software with CMake¶
As an example, let’s install libftdi from a source tarball.
First move into the source subdirectory, by convention:
$ dram cdsource
Download and extract the package here:
$ curl -O https://www.intra2net.com/en/developer/libftdi/download/libftdi1-1.5.tar.bz2
$ tar -xvf libftdi1-1.5.tar.bz2
$ cd libftdi1-1.5
Invoke CMake using the dram wrapper:
$ dram cmake ..
Install normally, which will install into this dram’s directory structure:
$ make && make install
Install Software with Autotools¶
Install autotools-based software is similar. Here is a typical installation of liquid-sdr:
$ dram cdsource
$ git clone https://github.com/jgaeddert/liquid-dsp.git
$ cd liquid-dsp
$ ./bootstrap.sh
$ dram configure
$ make && make install
Listing Drams¶
List all the current drams in your root:
$ dram list
If the -l flag is passed to dram list, then the size of each dram on disk will be printed as well.