Compile Elixir applications into single, easily distributed executable binaries
Bakeware extends Mix releases with the ability to turn Elixir projects into single binaries that can be copied and directly run. No need to install Erlang or untar files. The binaries look and feel like the build-products from other languages.
Here's a quick list of features:
- Simple - add the
bakeware
dependency and the Bakeware assembler to your Mix release settings - Supports OSX and Linux (We wrote the code with Windows and the BSDs in mind, so support for those platforms may not be far off)
- Zstd compression for small binaries
- Optional support for automatic software updates (work in progress)
- Commandline argument passing conveniences
- Lots of examples
This README contains the basics of making your applications work with Bakeware
and reference material for when you need to dig into how it works.
Since everything was written quickly and the integration is fairly
straightforward, we recommend that you take a look at the examples. The examples
are barebones Elixir scripts, OTP applications, Phoenix applications and more
with small changes to their mix.exs
files and instructions for running that
you can try out for yourself.
Bakeware supports tieing in executable binary assembly into a Mix release
as a step by using the Bakeware.assemble/1
function.
This will assemble the necessary components to create a Bakeware executable that can be distributed across machines to run the script/application without extra environment setup (such as installing Elixir/Erlang, etc)
To use, add this to your release as a step after assembly:
def release do
[
demo: [
steps: [:assemble, &Bakeware.assemble/1]
]
]
end
Bakeware also supports manually assembling the executable via mix bakeware.assemble
Generally, it is expected that you integrate assembly as a Mix release
step (see Bakeware.assemble/1
)
However, this task provides the ability to manually assemble the bakeware executable binary either for the current project, or for other specified release directories.
Supported options:
--name
- Name to use for the binary. Defaults to the app name--path
- path to release directory. Defaults to release directory of current Mix project
Bakeware supports an API similar to Escript for implementing a main
function.
The main
function will take 2 arguments:
arg0
- The absolute path to the executableargs
- Analogous to argv in other languages. A list or arguments passed to the executable
The main
function must return a superset of functions that :erlang.halt/1 supports:
- integer -> returning an integer will set the exit status. IE success: 0, error: >= 1
- iodata -> An Erlang crash dump is produced with
iodata
as slogan. Then the runtime system exits with status code 1. The string will be truncated if longer than 200 characters. - :abort -> The runtime system aborts producing a core dump, if that is enabled in the OS.
Example:
defmodule MyApp.Main do
use Bakeware.Script
@impl Bakeware.Script
def main(_arg0, _args) do
IO.puts "Hello, World!"
0
end
end
Bakeware binaries appear to have a lower bound of about 12 MB in size. We expect that they can be made smaller out-of-the-box, but here are a few things you can do:
- Make sure
zstd
is installed to enable compression during assembly:
- MacOS:
brew install zstd
- Ubuntu:
apt-get install zstd
- Build using
MIX_ENV=prod
. The default isMIX_ENV=dev
, so be sure that the environment variable is set. - Run
rm -fr _build
and thenmix release
. During development cruft builds up in the release directory. Bakeware can't tell the difference between the important files and the cruft, so executables will slowly grow in size if you don't do a clean build. - Inspect your
_build/prod/rel/<name>
directory and especially underlib
for files or dependencies that you might be including on accident. - Make sure that compile-time dependencies are marked as
runtime: false
in yourmix.exs
so that they're not included
Bakeware binaries include the Erlang runtime but there are still dependencies on the host system. These include the C runtime and other libraries referenced by the Erlang runtime and any NIFs and ports in your application. Luckily, the binary ABIs of many libraries are very stable, but if distributing to a wide audience, it's useful to build on a system with older library versions. Python has a useful pointers in their packaging guides.
In general, commandline arguments passed to Bakeware applications are passed through to Elixir. A few special commandline arguments can be passed to adjust the launchers behavior. Bakeware stops parsing commandline arguments when it encounters a --
. Processed commandline arguments are not passed along to Elixir.
The following arguments may be passed:
--bw-info
- Print out information about the application--bw-gc
- This cleans up all unused entries in the cache (NOT IMPLEMENTED)--bw-install
- Do not run the application. Stop after installing to the cache directory. (NOT IMPLEMENTED)--bw-system-install
- Install to a system-wide location (NOT IMPLEMENTED)
The Bakeware launcher sets the following environment variables for use in Elixir:
Variable name | Description |
---|---|
BAKEWARE_EXECUTABLE |
The absolute path to the executable |
BAKEWARE_ARG1 |
The first commandline argument |
BAKEWARE_ARGn |
The nth commandline argument |
BAKEWARE_ARGC |
The number of arguments |
See the Scripting secion of this document for a more user friendly API.
Bakeware application binaries look like this:
- Bakeware application launcher
- A CPIO archive of an Erlang/OTP release
- Trailer
The CPIO archive can be compressed. This depends on the contents of the trailer.
Trailer format (multi-byte fields are big endian):
Offset from end | Field | Type | Description |
---|---|---|---|
-4 | Magic | 4 byte string | Set to "BAKE" |
-5 | Trailer version | 8-bit integer | Set to 1 |
-6 | Compression | 8-bit integer | 0 = No compression, 1 = Zstd |
-8 | Flags | 16-bit integer | Set to 0 (no flags yet) |
-12 | Contents offset | 32-bit integer | Offset of CPIO archive |
-16 | Contents length | 32-bit integer | Length of CPIO archive |
-48 | SHA256 | 32 bytes | SHA-256 of the CPIO archive |
Bakeware maintains a cache of extracted binaries. This is needed to run the OTP releases and it enables start-time optimizations.
The cache directory location is system-specific:
- Windows -
"C:/Users/<USER>/AppData/Local/Bakeware/cache"
- macOS -
"~/Library/Caches/Bakeware"
- Linux and other Unixes -
"~/.cache/bakeware"
Here's the layout of each cache entry:
Path | Created by | Description |
---|---|---|
$CACHE_DIR/$SHA256/source_paths |
Launcher | A list of source paths (used for GC) |
$CACHE_DIR/$SHA256/bin |
CPIO | OTP release's bin directory |
$CACHE_DIR/$SHA256/erts-x.y.z |
CPIO | OTP release's ERTS |
$CACHE_DIR/$SHA256/lib |
CPIO | OTP release's lib directory |
$CACHE_DIR/$SHA256/releases |
CPIO | OTP release's releases directory |
$CACHE_DIR/$SHA256/start |
CPIO | Start script. E.g., bin/my_otp_release start |
TODO: Add lock file to protect an executable being extracted on top of itself. This might actually work, though...
All code is licensed under Apache-2.0 with the exception of zstd
which is dual licensed BSD/GPL. See it's LICENSE and
COPYING files for more details.