[Nix-dev] nix-bundle: Bundle Nix derivations to run anywhere

[Domen Kožar]

Awesome! I will need this very soon, good timing :)

On Tue, Feb 7, 2017 at 11:30 AM, Moritz Ulrich <moritz at tarn-vedra.de> wrote:

>
> Hey Matthew,
>
> This sounds great! I'll give it a try :-)
>
> One question: Will it create a persistent /nix directory on the machine
> the generated binary is running?
>
> Cheers
> Moritz
>
> Matthew Bauer <mjbauer95 at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > GitHub page: https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle
> >
> > I just wanted to post about a little project I've been working on. I'm
> > calling it "nix-bundle".
> >
> > Basically, what it does is: take a Nix closure, compress it into a
> > tarball, and turn that tarball into an executable using "Arx". The
> > final result looks like a plain shell script, but actually has a
> > tarball closure appended to it. When you run that script, Arx will
> > execute "nix-user-chroot" (which is included in the closure) which
> > will setup a /nix/ directory, then execute a target executable. All of
> > this should work "out of the box" for any Nix derivation folder with a
> > valid executable.
> >
> > For example, to generate a "hello" bundle:
> >
> > ./nix-bundle.sh hello /bin/hello
> >
> > "hello" specifies pkgs.hello and /bin/hello specifies the file
> > ${pkgs.helloi}/bin/hello to be executed. The output file will just be
> > called "hello".
> >p
> > The result is a "bundle" that can run without Nix being installed! No
> > external dependencies are needed because they are all contained within
> > the Nix closure.
> >
> > There are two main drawbacks: slow startup and large file size.
> > Extracting the tarball takes time and this adds on to startup times.
> > Also, because everything is included from the Nix closure, complicated
> > apps tend to be much larger because of the dependency tree.
> >
> > I've been experimenting with using AppImage as a format to package
> > them in, but it is not currently ready yet.
> > _______________________________________________
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> > nix-dev at lists.science.uu.nl
> > http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
>
> --
>
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