Slashpackage binaries compiled with Musl

I was fooling around with NixOS and it was a bit trickier to compile the binaries I was interested in. So I cobbled together a rudimentary slashpackage manager based off the work of Paul Jarc. The work was fairly complete for C programs, but it seems to be mostly abandoned at this point. Slashpackage binaries can be used on any system and are convenient for custom upgrades. All binaries are installed in /package and symlinked to /command or /package/host/…/command. You can install from src or install binary packages. I would recommend using musl instead of glibc, it makes smaller binaries, works pretty well, and also is portable. This installer allows you to publish your own snippets to compile software and the binaries themselves. I prefer to compile my server binaries against libressl, and this makes it a cinch to upgrade/downgrade and keep multiple versions around.

If you just want to try out some existing binaries

This now allows anyone else who has access to install the binary, but the only difference is that the binaries are symlinked to /package/host/spf.fxmanifold.com/foreign/command/ instead of /command/. To try out openssh, just do the following:

git clone https://github.com/tjheeta/slashpackage-installer
cd slashpackage-installer
mkdir /usr/local/package
ln -s /usr/local/package /package
# The openssh directories need to be owned by root so needs to be run with sudo
sudo ./spf-binary /package/host/spf.fxmanifold.com/foreign/openssh
sudo /package/host/spf.fxmanifold.com/command/sshd -D -f /etc/ssh/sshd_config  -p 2222

Note that if you get errors like “User someuser not allowed because account is locked”, that means you need to modify /etc/shadow to remove the ! symbols. For instance ubuntu:!:16480:0:99999:7::: should become ubuntu:*:16480:0:99999:7:::. More on that at here.

Setup your own repository - (optional)

Let’s say you want to setup your own repository of snippets and binaries. On your webserver, make this directory available which contains snippets of build scripts.

cd /path/to/html
git clone https://github.com/tjheeta/slashpackage-foreign

It should be accessible via http://yourhost.com/slashpackage-foreign/

Setup a host to compile on

After this, you can go to your target host and either compile binaries or installed pre-compiled. I would suggest using the included Vagrantfile.

git clone slashpackage-installer
cd slashpackage-installer
vagrant up
vagrant ssh
cd /vagrant/

If you don’t want to use vagrant, then there is a script “machine-setup.sh”, which will make the directories.

Setup the toolchain to use musl

If you want to compile everything against musl, do the following which will setup gcc to use musl. All the following examples will use the snippets at spf.fxmanifold.com, and there are some older packages available at http://code.dogmap.org./slashpackage-foreign/.

sudo -s
export PATH=/command:$PATH:/vagrant
SP_COMPAT=n ./spf-install /package/host/spf.fxmanifold.com/foreign/musl
cd /command
mv gcc-wrapper gcc
mv cc-wrapper cc

And to install a package - for instance openssh compiled against libressl:

SP_COMPAT=n ./spf-install /package/host/spf.fxmanifold.com/foreign/openssh

This will install OpenSSH into /package/host/spf.fxmanifold.com/foreign/openssh/command and all the binaries symlinked into /command/. The binaries are symlinked only against /package:

$ ldd /command/sshd
/package/host/spf.fxmanifold.com/foreign/musl-1.1.6+spf+1/prefix/lib/libc.so (0x7f7313d57000)
libcrypto.so.32 => /package/host/spf.fxmanifold.com/foreign/openssh-6.7p1+spf+0/conf/libressl/library/libcrypto.so.32 (0x7f7313955000)
libz.so.1 => /package/host/spf.fxmanifold.com/foreign/openssh-6.7p1+spf+0/conf/zlib/library/libz.so.1 (0x7f731373c000)
libc.so => /package/host/spf.fxmanifold.com/foreign/musl-1.1.6+spf+1/prefix/lib/libc.so (0x7f7313d57000)

Now you can go a bit further than this and publish your binaries on your webserver:

cd slashpackage-installer
./spf-publish /package/host/spf.fxmanifold.com/foreign/openssh-6.7p1+spf+0/
rsync -av -e ssh /package/host/spf.fxmanifold.com/dist spf.fxmanifold.com:/path/to/slashpackage-foreign

This is then consumed by the spf-binary command, which was the first example.

tl;dr - slashpackage allows simple consuming and creating of packages like nix