static-tools

Building static binaries of some tools using an Alpine Linux chroot with musl libc:

• bsdtar (from libarchive)
• mksquashfs, unsquashfs (from squashfs-tools)
• desktop-file-install, desktop-file-validate, update-desktop-database (from desktop-file-utils)
• appstreamcli (from AppStream)

Building locally

Binaries are provided on GitHub Releases. To build the runtime yourself, run:

docker run -it --rm --volume `pwd`:/workdir alpine:latest /workdir/build.sh

This whole process takes only a few seconds on GitHub Codespaces.

How to build static binaries

• Build inside an Alpine Linux chroot (which gives us many dependencies from the system)
• Build verbose (e.g., make -j$(nproc) VERBOSE=1)
• Look for the gcc command that produces the executable (-o name_of_the_executable)
• Replace gcc with gcc -static
• Remove all -W...
• Remove -lpthread
• Some applications that use ./configure can be configured like this: ./configure CFLAGS=-no-pie LDFLAGS=-static- NOTE: LDFLAGS=-static only works for binaries, not for libraries: it will not result in having the build system provide a static library (.a archive)