--- /dev/null
+<!--
+ - Copyright (C) 2019 Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. ("ISC")
+ -
+ - This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public
+ - License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this
+ - file, You can obtain one at http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/.
+-->
+
+<!-- need this include to make the &keaversion; macro work -->
+<!DOCTYPE book [
+<!ENTITY % keaversion SYSTEM "version.ent">
+%keaversion;
+]>
+
+<section xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" version="5.0" xml:id="hammer">
+ <title>Hammer Building Tool</title>
+ <para>
+ An optionl building tool called hammer was introduced with Kea 1.6.0. It
+ is a Python 3 script that lets users automate tasks related to building
+ Kea, such as setting up virtual machines, installing Kea dependencies,
+ compiling Kea with various options, running unit-tests and more. This tool
+ was created primarily for internal QA purposes at ISC, but since it was
+ proven to be quite powerful, it is now part of the Kea distribution.
+ </para>
+
+ <note>
+ <simpara>Use of this tool is completely optional. Everything it does can
+ be done manually.</simpara>
+ </note>
+
+
+ <para>
+ The first time user is strongly encouraged to look at hammer's built in
+ help: <screen><userinput>./hammer.py --help</userinput></screen> It will
+ list available parameters.
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+ Hammer is able to set up various operating systems running in LXC of
+ virtualbox. To list of supported systems, use
+ <command>list-systems</command> command:
+ <screen>
+$<userinput>./hammer.py list-systems</userinput>
+fedora:
+ - 27: lxc, virtualbox
+ - 28: lxc, virtualbox
+ - 29: lxc, virtualbox
+centos:
+ - 7: lxc, virtualbox
+rhel:
+ - 8: virtualbox
+ubuntu:
+ - 16.04: lxc, virtualbox
+ - 18.04: lxc, virtualbox
+ - 18.10: lxc, virtualbox
+debian:
+ - 8: lxc, virtualbox
+ - 9: lxc, virtualbox
+freebsd:
+ - 11.2: virtualbox
+ - 12.0: virtualbox
+</screen>
+</para>
+
+<!-- @todo: explain how to install deps (hammer ensure-hammer-deps), explain
+ what is installed -->
+
+<!-- @todo: explain how to install deps and kea on host system, without setting
+ up any VMs (is ensure-hammer-deps needed for this? if not, make a note
+ about it above) -->
+
+<para>
+ Hammer can be told to set up a new virtual machine and install specified OS on
+ it:
+ <screen>
+ ./hammer.py -p virtualbox -s freebsd -r 12.0 prepare-system
+ </screen>
+</para>
+
+<!-- @todo: describe how to install kea on a system,
+
+This didn't work (why?)
+./hammer.py -p virtualbox -s freebsd -r 12.0 -w install,unittest,docs,mysql build -->
+
+</section>