Updating and Testing ibek-support

The ibek-support repository contains ibek support YAML (files named *.ibek.support.yaml). Here is an example procedure for local testing of changes to support YAML in ibek-support alongside the IOC instance YAML that uses it.

(Suggest you do this inside a developer workspace devcontainer.)

cd my-workspace-folder

# clone ibek-support
git clone https://github.com/epics-containers/ibek-support.git
# clone a services repo that contains example IOC instance YAML
git clone https://github.com/epics-containers/example-services.git

# get the latest ibek installed (DLS users: module load uv)
uv tool install ibek

cd example-services/services/bl01t-ea-test-01
ibek runtime generate config/ioc.yaml ../../../ibek-support/*/*ibek.support.yaml

This gets ibek to generate a startup script and a database generation script. It uses config/ioc.yaml as the description of the IOC ‘entities’ to instantiate, and the support YAML files in ibek-support as the source of the definitions of the classes of entities available.

By default the generated files are written to the runtime output folder (/epics/runtime); pass -o <folder> to write them somewhere else, for example -o . to write into the current directory.

If your IOC instance is split across more than one entity file (for example a base config/ioc.yaml plus a services-repo config/runtime.yaml), use generate2, which takes the config folder and discovers both files:

ibek runtime generate2 config --definitions ../../../ibek-support/*/*ibek.support.yaml