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Packaging & Distribution

This guide covers how to package ContextForge for deployment in various environments, including building production containers and generating releases.

📦 Production Container (Podman or Docker)

Build an OCI-compliant container image using:

make podman        # builds using Containerfile.lite with Podman
# or manually
podman build -t mcpgateway:latest -f Containerfile.lite .

Or with Docker (if Podman is not available):

make docker        # builds using Containerfile.lite with Docker
# or manually
docker build -t mcpgateway:latest -f Containerfile.lite .

Containerfile.lite is the canonical multi-stage build (UBI builder → ubi-minimal runtime) supporting amd64, arm64, s390x, and ppc64le, with optional Rust runtime support (--build-arg ENABLE_RUST=true) and profiling tools (--build-arg ENABLE_PROFILING=true).

🔐 Run with TLS (self-signed)

make podman-run-ssl

This uses self-signed certs from ./certs/ and runs HTTPS on port 4444.

🛠 Container Run (HTTP)

make podman-run

This runs the container without TLS on port 4444.

📝 Versioning

ContextForge uses semantic versioning (MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH) and the version is defined in:

mcpgateway/__init__.py

You can bump the version manually or automate it via Git tags or CI/CD.

📁 Release Artifacts

If you need to ship ZIPs or wheels use the project build tooling:

make dist
# or
python3 -m build

Outputs land under dist/. You can then:

  • Push to PyPI (internal or public)
  • Upload to GitHub Releases
  • Package in a .deb, .rpm, etc.

📂 What's in the Container?

A typical image includes:

  • Gunicorn running with mcpgateway.main:app
  • All code, static files, and compiled assets

You can override settings using environment variables at runtime.