With this repository you can easily build most Haskell programs into fully static Linux executables.
ldd
says not a dynamic executable
)musl
instead of glibcstatic-haskell-nix can successfully build > 90% of Stackage executables, so chances are high it can build yours.
glibc
encourages dynamic linking to the extent that correct functionality under static linking is somewhere between difficult and bug-ridden.
For this reason, static linking, despite its many advantages (details here) has become less and less common.
Due to GHC's dependency on a libc, and many libraries depending on C libraries for which Linux distributions often do not include static library archive files, this situation has resulted in fully static Haskell programs being extremely hard to produce for the common Haskeller, even though the language is generally well-suited for static linking.
This project solves this.
It was inspired by a blog post by Vaibhav Sagar, and a comment by Will Dietz about musl.
Work on this so far was sponsored largely by my free time, FP Complete and their clients, and the contributors mentioned here.
By now we have a nixpkgs issue on Fully static Haskell executables (progress on which is currently this repo, with plans to later merge it into nixpkgs), and a merged nixpkgs overlay for static nixpkgs in general.
There's also nixpkgs's pkgsStatic
package set, which can also build many Haskell packages statically with musl
. Differences are:
pkgsStatic
uses cross-compilation infrastructure, which is inherently more complex, and more difficult to get into.static-haskell-nix
just replaces the libc, and compiles normally. This allows to build packages that cannot (yet) be cross-compiled..a
+ .so
files:
pkgsStatic
does exclusively static builds, it generates only .a
files and no .so
files.static-haskell-nix
generates both .a
and .so
files, which allows more intermediate software to run (e.g. some build systems using Python libraries doing dlopen()
on some .so
files)..so
files are present. This seems to have improved. static-haskell-nix
now has an off-by-default flag useArchiveFilesForTemplateHaskell
that users are encouraged to test.static-haskell-nix
contains a large amount of per-package fixes for static builds for which we haven't found a way to integrate them cleanly into nixpkgs yet.static-haskell-nix
does not impede nixpkgs progress, as it is maintained out of the nixkpgs.In general, any contribution to static-haskell-nix
or pkgsStatic
benefits the respective other one.
A goal is to shrink static-haskell-nix
over time, moving those parts into nixpkgs that do not slow down nixpkgs's fast pace.
You can support this project financially on OpenCollective. Goals:
[x] Dedicated build server - Goal reached! Thanks to our awesome contributors!
The first and main goal is to get to ~28 EUR/month to buy a cheap Hetzner dedicated build server for fast CI and pushing to Cachix. It will also allow anybody to download almost any executable on Stackage pre-built as a static binary, so that people can try out Haskell programs easily without having to install lots of dependencies.
Because the server is so cheap, already 1 or 2 EUR/month will bring us to that goal quickly.
The storage infrastructure (Cachix) for downloading pre-built packages is sponsored by the awesome guys from Hercules CI.
They are building a nix-based CI service you can safely run on your own infrastructure. static-haskell-nix also uses it.
If your company or project needs that, check Hercules CI out!
We have multiple CIs:
unstable
, daily: Shows up as Scheduled build.
May break when nixpkgs upstream changes.default.nix
builds an example executable (originally from https://github.com/vaibhavsagar/experiments). Run:
NIX_PATH=nixpkgs=nixpkgs nix-build --no-link
This prints a path that contains the fully linked static executable in the bin
subdirectory.
This example is so that you get the general idea. In practice, you probably want to use one of the approaches from the "Building arbitrary packages" or "Building stack projects" sections below.
Install cachix and run cachix use static-haskell-nix
before your nix-build
.
If you get a warning during cachix use
, read this.
If you don't want to install cachix
for some reason or cachix use
doesn't work, you should also be able to manually set up your nix.conf
(e.g. in $HOME/.config/nix/nix.conf
; you may have to create the file) to have contents like this:
extra-substituters = http://static-haskell-nix-ci.nh2.me:5000 https://cache.nixos.org https://static-haskell-nix.cachix.org
extra-trusted-public-keys = static-haskell-nix-ci-cache-key:Z7ZpqYFHVs467ctsqZADpjQ/XkSHx6pm5XBZ4KZW3/w= static-haskell-nix.cachix.org-1:Q17HawmAwaM1/BfIxaEDKAxwTOyRVhPG5Ji9K3+FvUU=
or append to command lines:
--option extra-substituters 'http://static-haskell-nix-ci.nh2.me:5000' --option extra-trusted-public-keys 'static-haskell-nix-ci-cache-key:Z7ZpqYFHVs467ctsqZADpjQ/XkSHx6pm5XBZ4KZW3/w='
Note that you may not get cached results if you use a different nix
version than I used to produce the cache (I used 2.0.4
as of writing, which you can get from here).
The survey
directory maintains a select set of Haskell executables that are known and not known to work with this approach; contributions are welcome to grow the set of working executables.
Run for example:
NIX_PATH=nixpkgs=nixpkgs nix-build --no-link survey/default.nix -A working
There are multiple package sets available in the survey (select via -A
):
working
-- build all exes known to be workingnotWorking
-- build all exes known to be not working (help welcome to make them work)haskellPackages.somePackage
-- build a specific package from our overridden package setIf you are a nix user, you can easily import
this functionality and add an override to add your own packages.
stack
projectsThe static-stack2nix-builder-example
directory shows how to build any stack
-based project statically.
Until Stack 2.3, the official static build of stack
itself was built using this method (Stack >= 2.3 static builds are built in an Alpine Docker image after GHC on Alpine started working again, see here).
The static-stack
directory shows how Stack itself can be built statically with static-haskell-nix.
stack
is a big package with many dependencies, demonstrating that it works also for large projects.
You can contribute to these to help static Haskell executables:
cannot find section .dynamic
. Is this an error?
patchelf
. If your final looks like
...
cannot find section .dynamic
/nix/store/dax3wjbjfrcwj6r3mafxj5fx6wcg5zbp-stack-2.3.0.1
then /nix/store/dax3wjbjfrcwj6r3mafxj5fx6wcg5zbp-stack-2.3.0.1
is your final output store path whose /bin
directory contains your static executable.
stack2nix: user error (No such package mypackage-1.2.3 in the cabal database. Did you run cabal update?)
.
hackageSnapshot = "2019-05-08T00:00:00Z";
to a newer date (past the time that package-version was added to Hackage).-v
to Cabal, and to GHC itself:
nix-build --expr '(import ./survey/default.nix {}).haskellPackages.YOURPACKAGE.overrideAttrs (old: { configureFlags = (old.configureFlags or []) ++ ["-v" "--ghc-options=-v"]; })'
Look for *** Linker:
in the GHC output.
static-haskell-nix
version: The one before this PR was merged.Nixpkgs issue Provide middle-ground overlay between pkgsMusl and pkgsStatic:
Should nixpkgs provide a makeStaticAndSharedLibraries
adapter to provide a package set?
That might be better (but more difficult) than what we do now, with dontDisableStaticOverlay
, because:
dontDisableStatic
is to prevent --disable-static
to autoconf, which is really specific to C + autoconf.
A package set should do more than that, also for Meson, CMake, etc.
nh2
started implementing this idea in nixpkgs branch static-haskell-nix-nixos-24.05-makeStaticAndSharedLibraries
.Can we avoid building bootstrap tools?
xgcc
, gcc
, binutils
, and so on..a
files, and some of those are also dependencies of e.g. gcc
.pkgsStatic
avoids that by being a cross
toolchain.cross
may have additional complexities when building the actual packages we're interested in, vs just switching the libc ("native" compilation)?
Unclear.How should we handle pkg-config
regarding static dependencies?
E.g. libtiff
depends on lerc
and libtiff-4.pc
correctly declares
Libs.private: -llzma -lLerc -ljpeg -ldeflate -lz -lm
Requires.private: liblzma libjpeg libdeflate zlib
But the .pc
file does not include the path on which libLerc.a
can be found, nor does anything in nixpkgs set PKG_CONFIG_PATH
such that Lerc.pc
is on it.
Thus, linking a static binary that uses libtiff-4.pc
fails with
cannot find -lLerc: No such file or directory
propagatedBuildInputs
for this?stdenvAdapters.propagateBuildInputs
.
pkgsMusl
does) causes:
error: build of '/nix/store/...-stdenv-linux.drv' failed: output '/nix/store/...-stdenv-linux' is not allowed to refer to the following paths:
/nix/store/...-binutils-patchelfed-ld-wrapper-2.41
/nix/store/...-pcre2-10.43-dev
/nix/store/...-gmp-with-cxx-6.3.0-dev
/nix/store/...-musl-iconv-1.2.3
/nix/store/...-binutils-2.41
/nix/store/...-bootstrap-tools
pkgsStatic
.
So we probably need to do something similar.libtiff
to include lerc
in Requires.private
.