preloadify 1.0
Create fat binaries with ease.
License: MIT

preloadify
==========

Create fat binaries with ease

This script is not a development of 2020, this GitHub repository could
create a false impression. It was lurking around on my computer for
years, because I never thought it was quite finished, and therefore
never got around to releasing it. In truth it worked the whole time for
the current set of features, and I wanted to add some more before
releasing it.

This script can be a great alternative to static compilation, or to
cases where you have a dynamically linked binary, that you’d like to
port to other systems, but you aren’t willing to compile from source, or
for some reason can’t. To make this work preloadify uses LD_PRELOAD, a
unpacking/run script at the beginning of the created binary, tar,
optional compression, and patchelf.

Preloadify goes so far as to include the ld.so in the created binary
(which is a sort of self-contained package) in order to make absolutely
sure that it will run on every Linux system with compatible processor
architecture, in example all 64bit-x86 Linux systems. This allows for
porting binaries from a full-fledged GNU/Linux to a bare-bones embedded
Linux system, that has for example BusyBox, or some uncommon libc, or no
ld.so at all.

The –pack command line option allows you to pack other binaries into the
same final fat binary, the kicker here is that for those additional
binaries preloadify also searches for needed dynamic libraries and packs
them into the fat binary, too. This means that the executable you wanted
to convert into a fat executable can also call those other packed
executables at runtime and they are also garantueed not to be missing
any dynamic library dependencies.

Dependencies: - docopt (pip3 install docopt) - patchelf - tar

The help output (preloadify –help) should be sufficient to understand
how it works:

::

   Usage: preloadify [options] EXECUTABLE OUTPUTFILE

   Create an executable self-containing all dynamic library dependencies of the original.

   Options:
     -l, --list                  Alphabetically sorted list of all dynamic libraries
                                 that are included in the preloadified executable.
     -s, --size                  Lists the size of all dynamic libraries included in the
                                 preloadified executable sorted by size.
     -b, --blacklist FILE        Using a blacklist you can exclude dynamic libraries
                                 from being included in the preloadified executable.
                                 Blacklist files have the following format:
                                     libsomelib
                                     libsomeotherlib
     -a, --addlist FILE          Include libraries and their respective dependencies
                                 from a list in preloadified executable.
                                 These usually are libraries that get dynamically
                                 linked at runtime.
                                 Addlist files have the following format:
                                     libsomelib
                                     libsomeotherlib
                                     /path/to/lib
     -c, --compression METHOD    One of gzip, bzip2 and xz.
                                 By default compression is disabled.
                                 Note that compression can influence portability negatively.
     -t, --tmpdir TMPDIR         Set a different tmp directory. Default is /tmp.
     -r, --run                   Run preloadified executable as soon as it is created.
                                 (For testing purposes)
     --chrootify                 With this option the wrapper creates a chroot environment
                                 for the executable emulating the system without its libraries.
                                 This can be useful to test whether all library dependencies
                                 have been taken care of through preloadifying.
     --pack EXECUTABLES          List of additional executables that should be part of the
                                 preloadified executable separated by comma.
                                 i.e. --pack bash,/path/to/program
                                 Note that only the main executable will be executed
                                 when executing the generated outputfile.
     -h, --help                  Show this help message and exit
     -v, --version               Display version information