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nix-bundle-exe

This is a simple Nix derivation to bundle Mach-O (macOS) and ELF (Linux) executables into a relocatable directory structure. That is to say, given a Nix package containing executables, this derivation will produce a package with those same executables, but with all their shared libraries copied into a new directory structure and reconfigured to work without any dependency on Nix.

If you are able to build your executable with full static linking, that would be better than using this derivation. For cases where that is too difficult, you can use this.

This tool has a very similar goal to nix-bundle with some key differences:

  1. nix-bundle works on arbitrary derivations and can bundle any resource, not just shared libraries. This tool only works on executables and their shared libraries.
  2. nix-bundle does not work on macOS. This tool does.
  3. nix-bundle requires target systems to have certain Linux kernel features. This tool requires Linux target systems to be POSIX only. macOS targets have no requirements.
  4. nix-bundle has some large build-time dependencies which may make it hard to use in CI in some cases. This tool has no additional build-time dependencies.

You may also want to check out shrinkrap.

Examples

This will make a bundle of opencv where all of its binaries can be run on a system where Nix is not installed.

nix-build -E 'with import <nixpkgs> {}; callPackage ./. {} opencv'

This will bundle gzip only, and not any of its accompanying scripts:

nix-build -E 'with import <nixpkgs> {}; callPackage ./. {} "${gzip}/bin/gzip"'

(Avoiding the accompanying scripts makes the resulting closure extremely small and does not depend on the original gzip closure in any way.)