mkarchive

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.

Installing

Mkarchive can be installed straight from PYPI using pip:

python3 -m pip install mkarchive

Requirements

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.

Usage

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

Generating the setup program

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.

Having mkarchive create the setup program

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 smartsetup utility

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

License

This software is released under the MIT License