statish

You want to run a shellscript on some machine, but it doesn’t have all of the binaries your script needs? Try statish! Using the awesome power of ❄️nixpkgs❄️ and some truly horrendous ELF magic, it combines your script & all of its dependencies into a single, statically-linked executable!

Usage

# flake.nix

{
  inputs = {
    statish = {
      url = "github:42LoCo42/statish";

      # optional
      # inputs.flake-utils.follows = "flake-utils";
      # inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
    };
  };

  outputs = { flake-utils, nixpkgs, statish, ... }:
    flake-utils.lib.eachDefaultSystem (system:
      let pkgs = import nixpkgs { inherit system; }; in {
        packages.default = statish.lib.mkstatish {
          name = "example";
          bins = [ "curl" ];
          inherit pkgs;

          text = ''
            echo "henlo wrold :3"
            echo "my IP is $(curl -s https://ip.me)"
          '';

          # shell = "bash";
          # the default shell is bash
          # set to null to directly launch the script
          # (using its shebang to find the interpreter)
        };
      });
}

Under the hood

Using Golang, we create a statically-linked “template” loader that reads its own binary file, finds the statish section and unpacks it (as a tar-zstd archive) into a temporary folder.

It also reads a shell name from the statish-shell section. If this was successful, it executes the given shell in the tempdir, giving it the name of the script (always main) as well as any arguments passed to the loader.

If no shell was found, it instead directly executes the main file (but still gives it any passed arguments).

The template loader is “instantiated” by the lib.mkstatish function exposed by this flake, which looks up all of the requested bins (and the shell) in the pkgsStatic subset of nixpkgs. It then generates the corresponding archive and attaches it as well as the shell name to its output copy of the loader.