Dockerfile based build scripts to compile various static binaries of useful tools.
I often found myself in shells where I needed a newer version of a particular tool, which was not available through the package manager .. or the system even lacked a package manager to begin with. In that case it can be helpful to have portable binaries that you can just copy to the target without worrying about library dependencies and be able to use it right away.
The scripts placed in build/
are Dockerfiles that must be built with the builtkit
frontend. However, the end result is not a container image but a built binary that is saved in the compiled/
directory, which you can then copy where-ever you like. The fact that everything is built inside a container means that you do not need to provide any specific build environment โ besides an installation of Docker.
Using the buildx
plugin you can even compile binaries for another platform by starting a multi-platform capable builder instance and adding a --platform
argument.
The binaries are compiled in a GitHub workflow regularly. These precompiled binaries and all the downloaded sources that were used can be found in the action artifacts: click on a run and download the corresponding archive form the build artifacts.
- Docker with
buildkit
support /buildx
plugin, i.e. at least 19.03 make
,find
,sed
Available build targets are given by the Dockerfiles in build/
:
make busybox
make curl
make fdisk
(includesblkid
,losetup
,(u)mount
,nsenter
&unshare
)make git
make gpg
make make
make openssl
make rsync
make vim
make zstd
The output will be placed in compiled/
in a subdirectory matching your native platform.
Some of the scripts use GPG signatures for which the trusted signing keys are stored in build/*.keys
files and are imported before checking the downloaded sources.
First, setup buildx
for multi-platform building. Let's assume you already ran docker buildx create --use ...
etc. and your currently used build server is multi-platform capable. Then you should be able to use the --platform
argument with docker build
invocations, too.
The Makefile contains targets for most available platforms. In order to build fdisk
for linux/arm64
you'd use the compiled/linux-arm64/fdisk/
target:
make compiled/linux-arm64/fdisk/
I haven't actually tested all combinations yet, because it takes a very long time under emulation. Available target platforms are:
linux-amd64
linux-arm64
linux-armv7
linux-armv6
linux-riscv64
linux-s390x
linux-386
If you want to add some other arguments to docker build
or want to create your own script, this is the command the gets executed in the example above:
DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 docker build -f build/fdisk build/
--target binary -o type=local,dest=compiled/linux-arm64/fdisk/ \
--platform linux/arm64
Add your own build scripts in build/
:
- add a Dockerfile named like the binary you want to compile
- use seperate
RUN
commands for better caching of steps - the
build/
directory will be the context, so you may add scripts andCOPY
them - use a final
FROM scratch AS binary
stage and only copy the output binary into this rootfs