Hardening consulting (Posts about accendino)

Release of Accendino 0.6.2

David FORT — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 09:15:00 GMT

A new version of accendino is out, 0.6.2. It bundles the work accumulated since 0.6.0 (which introduced toolchain support and building under msys2), going through an intermediate 0.6.1. As a reminder, accendino is a project that lets you specify how to build a piece of software and its dependencies in a multi-platform way (at least Windows, Linux, partially Mac, a bit of FreeBSD), building it while making the best use of the bricks already installable on the system (if a package is available, we use it, otherwise we build it). It also tries as much as possible to support MinGW, to allow cross-building for Windows from Linux or other unixes. On the menu for these changes: the ability to build the wayvnc project with all its dependencies, the FreeRDP build gaining features to keep up with the master branch, and of course several fixes and improvements.

What's new since 0.6.0

The FreeRDP build gets richer

Several artifacts were added to enrich the FreeRDP build:

Accendino 0.5.10 alpha 1

David FORT — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 06:15:00 GMT

More improvements on Accendino, with that 0.5.10alpha1 version which is the stabilization course for 0.5.10.

FFmpeg is one of those softwares that are horrible to automatically build under windows (just behind OpenSSL), and one of the targets for this version was to be able to build FreeRDP with the support of FFmpeg under windows with the Visual Studio toolchain, and do all that automatically. No by hand hacks to make it work, just

$ accendino --targets=freerdp3 freerdp.accendino

It checks out, compiles and it's ready.

New features in version 0.5.10 alpha 1

Support for Msys2

First step to compile FFmpeg with Visual Studio: you need to execute commands under msys2, and therefore this version brings package installation support to this environment. If you put 'msys2/yasm' in packages dependencies, accendino will install the corresponding packages in the msys2 environment.

Extract from the FFmpeg accendino file:

...

ffmpegPkgs = {
    'Darwin': ['nasm'],
    'Windows': ['choco/nasm|path/nasm', 'msys2/make', 'msys2/yasm', 'msys2/diffutils'],
}

...

This support was not very complex to implement because msys2 uses pacman as package manager, which is already supported in accendino for ArchLinux. We already had everything we needed to list installed packages and run package installations.

A new makeMsys2 builder type has been added for CustomCommandBuildArtifact, which allows to launch make but in the msys2 environment, that's the way to build FFmpeg with MSVC.

Toolchain

This version brings the notion of toolchain, which basically allows to specify which buildchain to use. Under the Unixes, we have the choice between gcc and clang, and under windows we will detect Visual Studio and you can use with MSVC or clang (vs/msvc or vs/clang).

The toolchain support enables to set the right environment variables for gcc or clang builds (which will then be used by meson, cmake or others), but also to call the VsDevCmd.bat script of visual studio (or its powershell equivalent).

All of this was required for FFmpeg, because when you do the build process by hand, you open a Visual Studio development shell that allows you to have the PATH positioned properly, then from there you run a msys2 shell that will inherit of these values, and the build is launched inside this msys2 shell.

The build process under windows has therefore also been redesigned and so now we generate a powershell script containing all commands and this powershell script is then executed. This facilitates management of environment variables, but also debugging, because you can easily restart the script with exactly the same environment (because all this is done in the powershell script itself). With all these additions, we automate the construction of FFmpeg under windows with Visual Studio.

Even if we already had the possibility to make a cross compilation with mingw on Linux and then transfer the files under windows, it is so more convenient to build on windows and use directly VisualStudio if you have to do a debugging session.

With the support of the toolchains, the BuildArtifact gains a new toolchainArtifacts argument that gives the list of artifacts that should be pulled from the toolchain. The default value is to indicate that it is desired to use a C compiler (c), but you can also add c++ for projects coded in this language.

Various other changes

A lot of other improvements have been made in this version:

accendino files have been added for Cairo, cJson and qfreerdp_platform, which allows to build these projects very easily and have a more feature complete FreeRDP under windows;
now when accendino detects a rebuild for an item, it will also rebuild all the items which that item depends on;
with this version we look for the accendino files passed in command line in the current path and then in the pockets: no need to give the complete path when the accessino file is stored in a pocket directory;
the include() command has a new include_once parameter (true by default) which allows to specify that a file should only be included once during the execution of accendino;
CI tests have been added to validate that everything is working properly after changes, this allows to validate a number of build cases with accendino under linux and even windows;

To conclude

With these changes, you can easily have the latest FreeRDP under windows with every possible features with a simple:

C:\Users\david> accendino --targets=freerdp3 freerdp.accendino

VisualStudio will be detected, any packages installed, etc.

And under Linux:

$ accendino --targets=qfreerdp_platform-qt6 --toolchain=clang qfreerdp_platform.accendino

and you have qfreerdp_platform compiled for Qt6 under clang. There's really no excuse to not have tested these nice projects yet !

This is basically the functional scope that will be in the 0.5.10 release, any feedback or bug reports are welcome.

Release of Accendino 0.5.9

David FORT — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 10:15:00 GMT

I made some updates to my Accendino script, until it became a program of its own with interesting features. This version 0.5.9 adds a lot of nice things compared to the previous version. Over time, I see Accendino more as a program allowing to build a complex software from several software sources, and on several platforms. For now my case study is FreeRDP, I try to have accendino files that allow to build FreeRDP from scratch on as many platforms as possible (linux, mac, windows, mingw, ...)

History

Originally accendino was just a small script to run the Ogon installation instructions. It was a bit more complex because you could specify the git locations to download. For example, to use the Forgiare repositories instead of the official Ogon repositories. With version 0.5.0, I extended its features quite a lot:

the ability to include accendino files to reuse existing definitions;
the program sources have been greatly extended and no longer necessarily come from git. We can have local sources, or from git. Many git options are now accessible;
Read more… (5 min remaining to read)

accendino, an OGON deployer

David FORT — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 06:12:00 GMT

Long time no post. I did quite a lot of things around ogon these last months, and for testing purpose, I had to deploy ogon on many hosts. The deployment guide is ok, but it's a long and repetitive operation. And thinking of it, if we can write these instructions in a manual, then for sure we can automate these operations in a script.

Accendino

So I've created that little software accendino (lighter in italian) that will allow you to start a big fire (ogon in russian).