Xen API (or xapi) is a management stack that configures and controls Xen-enabled hosts and resource pools, and coordinates resources within the pool. Xapi exposes the Xen API interface for many languages and is a component of the XenServer project. Xen API is written mostly in OCaml 4.07.

Xapi is the main component produced by the Linux Foundation's Xapi Project.

To build xen-api from source, we recommend using opam with the xs-opam repository (further explanation in its readme).

1. Install opam and git with your package manager.

2. Clone this repo and work from its root.

   git clone https://github.com/xapi-project/xen-api && cd xen-api

3. Figure out which version of ocaml-base-compiler to use.

   • Go to this xs-opam file, and look for OCAML_VERSION_FULL.

   • Run that line, e.g.:

     export OCAML_VERSION_FULL="4.14.1"

4. Setup opam with your environment (i.e. switch).

   opam init
   opam switch create xen-api ocaml-base-compiler.$OCAML_VERSION_FULL
   # This basically "jumps you into" the environment you just created:
   eval $(opam env --switch=xen-api --set-switch)

5. Get the Recommended Packages.

   # Add the xs-opam library as the main repo to check for versions at:
   opam repo add xs-opam https://github.com/xapi-project/xs-opam.git
   # Remove the default, because how it handles version conflicts is different:
   opam repo remove default
   # (NOT needed with opam>=2.1.0) Have opam now figure out what versions of each package to use:
   opam pin --yes add . --no-action

6. Install all the Packages.

   opam install xs-toolstack
   # Update the current switch. (You're already on the correct one, just refresh it).
   eval $(opam env)

7. Build xen-api.

   ./configure
   make
   make test

The binaries should now be in ./_build/install/default/bin!

If you are working from within a clone of a fork of this repository, you will need tags from the upstream repository in order to produce a build with the correct versioning string.

To fetch these tags, you must ensure that this repository is known to git (as a remote, often called upstream) and then you can fetch the tags as follows:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/xapi-project/xen-api
git fetch upstream --tags

You can check if this has been successful by invoking git describe.

You can then push these tags to your remote repository to ensure they are cloned in future:

git push origin --tags

To contribute patches to xen-api, please fork the repository on Github, and then submit a pull request. If for some reason you can't use Github to submit a pull request, then you may send your patch for review to the [email protected] mailing list, with a link to a public git repository for review. We much prefer Github pull requests, however, and submitting a patch to the mailing list will take much more time for review.

Maintainers can be contacted via this mailing list: [email protected]

This software is licensed under the GNU LGPLv2 license. Please see the LICENSE file for more information.