Ghidra CI

Here, you'll find nightly builds of the NSA's Ghidra, a Software Reverse Engineering framework. In particular, it creates a single cross-platform ZIP as close as possible to the official builds.

How it works.

The CI can be found in the .github/workflows folder. There are two main components:

• check_new_commits.yml: Responsible for comparing the latest release of this repo with the Upstream's latest commits, to find out if some new commits were made since the last run (Ghidra doesn't get new commits every day, so we avoid doing unnecessary rebuilds on the silent days).
• ci.yml: Actually does the work of building the CI.

There's also simulate_activity.yml, which is mostly there to work around Github disabling workflows after two months of inactivity. By simulating activity on the master branch, we avoid this.

Check new commits

check_new_commits.yml runs every night. It parses the latest release name to find out which commit it was built from. It then checks whether this matches the latest commit from NSA's Ghidra master branch. If it doesn't, it triggers the ci.yml workflow through a workflow_dispatch call.

CI

The actual CI is split in two jobs:

• build-natives: Builds the native binaries for all the supported platforms. This job will install the necessary tools to build the native binaries on the given platform, and run gradle buildNatives_<target>. Note that, for building on arm64, we copy over linux_arm_64.init.gradle or mac_arm_64.init.gradle to the ~/.gradle/init.gradle. This is used to cross-compile the ARM64 binaries from an X64 host. This is used because GitHub does not provide an ARM64 Github Runner, so cross-compilation must be used.

• dist: Downloads all the artifacts from build-natives, downloads the FunctionID from the [ghidra-data] repository, and runs gradle buildGhidra. This will create a cross-platform dist, which is then uploaded to the releases. Finally, the generate_changelog.js script is run to generate the changelog.

Building a fork

If you want to use this CI to build your fork of ghidra, it's now very simple:

• First, fork this repository
• Navigate to the settings of the ghidra-ci fork, then go to Secrets and Variables -> Actions -> Variables -> New Repository Variable.
• Here, create a variable named GHIDRA_REPO, and set its value to the username/reponame of your ghidra fork, for instance NationalSecurityAgency/Ghidra.
• Save that variable.
• Enable github actions by navigating to the actions of your ghidra-ci fork, and enabling all three workflows.

Remaining work

There are several improvements to be made:

1. The Eclipse IDE plugin should be built. This is not really possible today, as eclipse IDE plugins can only be built through manual action from the Eclipse IDE software.