What is The Ur Project?

The Ur Project is an open source system for building Linux distributions. It is a build system, written in Rust, that turns declarative recipes into packages, publishes them in signed repositories, and composes them into images you can boot and install. The same code also sits on the other end: pkg is the package manager, the image builder, and a tool that can rebuild any package right on your own machine.

Everything it produces is meant to be checked, not taken on faith. Repositories are secured by TUF and carry the sources right next to the binaries. And it is built to be shared: recipes live in registries, which are plain git trees, and anyone can run the build system themselves, to layer a repository on top of ours, replace parts of it, or start over from their own bootstrap.

Auke Kok (sofar) founded the project on the hardest lesson of nearly two decades of building distributions: a distro only lasts if the people who use it can easily make it their own, and give back. More about the project.

Sandcastle

Sandcastle is the rolling release of The Ur Project. It follows the latest stable release of everything, nothing pre-release. Released as often as is needed to keep up.

Sandcastle is also where the project puts its foundational principles to work, in development and in validation:

• Reproducible. Everyone can validate that every binary on their system originates from its sources.
• Tested. Every change becomes new images that are booted, installed and checked on several machines before release. If it doesn't pass, it doesn't ship.
• Compliant. Sources, SPDX license data and SBOMs ship with everything, so nobody has to guess how anything is licensed.
• Yours. Use it as it is, make your own derivative of it, or contribute back, without a corporate owner controlling it.

Download Sandcastle, or follow the installation guide.