Mkarchive is a self-executable archive generator for Linux. It generates an archive in the form of an ELF executable file that, when executed, will extract its contents to a temporary directory, and then run a program called setup
, which must have been included with the archive files.
It comes with smartsetup
, a utility that will generate a setup
program for you, based on the dialog
utility.
You may want to consider makeself as an alternative to this software.
Mkarchive can be installed straight from PYPI using pip
:
python3 -m pip install mkarchive
On the development machine, mkarchive
requires the gcc
compiler to be in the path, and also libtar
and zlib
.
On the target machine, it requires bash
and libc6
must be the same version as in the development machine. Also, depending on how you created the archive, it might need libtar
and zlib
to be installed. On a Debian-like distro you may need to do:
$ apt install libtar-dev zlib1g-dev
mkarchive
will try to link both libraries statically to relieve the target machine of this requirement but, obviously, the archive will be a little heavier as a result.
If you are using dialog
or whiptail
then it needs to be installed on the target machine, or you may need to include it inside your archive and provide a setup
program that can find them.
To simply create a self-extracting archive just use:
$ mkarchive *
This will archive all the files and directories on the current working directory and create the self-executable archive called selfextract
also on the working directory.
If you want the archive to have a different name or to be created elsewhere, you can use the --output
, or -o
option:
$ mkarchive -o ~/extractor.bin *
Note that the archives, as mentioned above, after unarchiving, will run a user-supplied program called setup
that must have been included on the top level directory.
A minimal setup
program could be:
#!/bin/bash
echo "Hello, I'm $0 called with $1 and the working directory is $(pwd)"
We can then create a minimal self-executable with it:
$ mkarchive setup
Creating tar '/tmp/tmpsqwogss0/_tmp.tar.gz'
Creating selfextract1
/tmp/tmpsqwogss0/selfextract1 created with size 104560
Recompiling /tmp/tmpsqwogss0/selfextract0.c
Size of /tmp/tmpsqwogss0/selfextract1 matches 104560
Concatenating /tmp/tmpsqwogss0/selfextract1 and /tmp/tmpsqwogss0/_tmp.tar.gz into selfextract
Adding /tmp/tmpsqwogss0/selfextract1
Adding /tmp/tmpsqwogss0/_tmp.tar.gz
And then we can run the resulting selfextract
archive:
$ ./selfextract
Hello, I'm /tmp/selfex__AvVAsz/setup called with /tmp/selfex__AvVAsz and the working directory is /home/javier
Your program will probably need to be a tad more sophisticated than this one and will use the directory supplied as its first argument to do its job.
If a setup
program is not provided, mkarchive will supply one for you that just copies the unarchived files and directories to the user's current working directory.
Also, in the examples above, mkarchive
has found libtar.a
and libz.a
on their default locations. You may want to specify a path to these libraries using the --libtar
and --zlib
command line options if you have your own compiled versions of these libraries, or your distribution installs them at a different location than Ubuntu, e.g:
$ mkarchive --libtar /path/to/libtar.a --zlib /path/to/libz.a -o ~/extractor.bin setup file1 file2
You may link them dynamically by specifying -ltar
and -lz
respectively:
$ mkarchive --lbitar=-ltar --zlib=-lz setup file1 file2
mkarchive
can generate the setup
program for you using the included smartsetup
utility. In order to do that you need to create a YAML file containing a specification of the installer program. All it does is to make it a bit easier to write an installer program using dialog
screens.
Basically, the installer specification has two sections: the install
section that contains the screens of the installer, and an uninstall
section. Each of these two sections contain a list of objects that correspond to parameters of the dialog
utility, or a bash code snippet, e.g:
install:
- type: inputbox
title: Enter input file
text: What file do you want to copy?
store: filetocopy
default: file1
- type: inputbox
title: Destination directory
text: Enter the destination directory
store: destdir
- type: code
text: cp -v $filetocopy $destdir
All types in the type
field, except code
correspond to dialog types of the dialog
utility, e.g inputbox
, yesno
, checklist
etc. title
is the --title
option and text
is the text. Other options can be specified as a list in the options
field.
When dialog
would write a value to the error stream stderr
you can specify in the store
field the name of a variable to store it. When the result is the program return code, you can check it using $exitval
.
The installer must always define the variable $destdir
, as it is where the uninstaller program (if there is an uninstall
section) will be created.
The dialogs may be shown conditionally by putting a condition in the condition
file. This should be the arguments of the test
shell command e.g:
- title: Installation Successful
type: msgbox
condition: $success -eq 1
text: The installation of $program $version has been successful.
mkarchive
accepts the --install-spec
command line option to specify the YAML file specification.
You can also use one or more --var
options to pre-define variables available to the installer program.
You can use --dialog-tool
to specify the path (on the destination machine with an absolute path, or inside the archive with a relative path) of the dialog
or whiptail
command.
Finally, you can specify a name for the uninstaller program using the --uninstaller-name
option:
$ mkarchive --output ~/mysoft_installer.bin \
--install-spec=setup.yml \
--uninstaller-name=mysoft_uninstall.bin \
--var=program=mysoft \
--var=version=1.2 \
file1 file2 dir1
The setup
program can be generated independently of the self-extracting archive using the smartsetup
command with options similar to the ones mentioned above:
$ smartsetup --help
usage: smartsetup [-h] [--name script-name] [--uname script-name]
[--dialog-tool dialog-tool] [--var varname[=value]]
spec
Generate installer/uninstaller scripts from a YAML specification
positional arguments:
spec Input specification in YAML
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--name script-name, -n script-name
Generate script with this name. Default 'setup'
--uname script-name, -u script-name
Name of the uninstaller script. Default 'uninstall'
--dialog-tool dialog-tool, -d dialog-tool
Name of the dialog tool. Default 'dialog'
--var varname[=value], -v varname[=value]
Define variable and its value for use in the script
This software is released under the MIT License