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

[Tomasz Czyż]

Matthew,
very good tool, thank you for sharing.

2017-02-07 10:32 GMT+00:00 Domen Kožar <domen at dev.si>:

> 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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-- 
Tomasz Czyż
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