omnijar/rust repository overview

⁠Rust Docker container for easily building static Rust binaries

This repository is used to build a Docker image for the Rust programming language and a few supporting tools. The image includes rustc, rustdoc, cargo, git, SSL certificates, and build essentials, so it should be able to run cargo build on most projects out of the box. The path /root is a volume where you can mount a Cargo project from the host machine.

⁠Usage

The following command will drop you into a Bash shell with the current directory on the host shared. From there you can run rustc, rustdoc, and cargo as you please.

docker run -it --rm -v $(pwd):/root omnijar/rust

⁠Building for musl

⁠Without dependencies

alias omnijar-musl-builder='docker run --rm -it -v "$(pwd)":/home/rust/src omnijar/rust:linux-musl'
omnijar-musl-builder cargo build --release

This command assumes that $(pwd) is readable and writable by uid 1000, gid 1000. It will output binaries in target/x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/release. At the moment, it doesn't attempt to cache libraries between builds, so this is best reserved for making final release builds.

⁠Deploying your Rust application

You should be able to just copy your application binary from target/x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/release, and install it directly on any reasonably modern x86_64 Linux machine. In particular, you should be able to copy your Rust application into an Alpine Linux container⁠.

⁠How it works

rust-musl-builder uses musl-libc⁠, musl-gcc⁠, and the new rustup⁠ target support. It includes static versions of several libraries:

• The standard musl-libc libraries.
• OpenSSL, which is needed by many Rust applications, and requires specific considerables under macOS.

⁠Adding more C libraries

If you're using Docker crates which require specific C libraries to be installed, you can create a Dockerfile based on this one, and use musl-gcc to compile the libraries you need. For example:

FROM omnijar/rust:linux-musl

RUN VERS=1.2.11 && \
    cd /home/rust/libs && \
    curl -LO http://zlib.net/zlib-$VERS.tar.gz && \
    tar xzf zlib-$VERS.tar.gz && cd zlib-$VERS && \
    CC=musl-gcc ./configure --static --prefix=/usr/local/musl && \
    make && sudo make install && \
    cd .. && rm -rf zlib-$VERS.tar.gz zlib-$VERS

This usually involves a bit of experimentation for each new library, but it seems to work well for most simple, standalone libraries.

If you need an especially common library, please feel free to submit a pull request adding it to the main Dockerfile! We'd like to support popular Rust crates out of the box.

⁠Making static releases with Travis CI and GitHub

These instructions are inspired by rust-cross⁠.

First, read the Travis CI: GitHub Releases Uploading⁠ page, and run travis setup releases as instructed. Then add the following lines to your existing .travis.yml file, replacing myapp with the name of your package:

language: rust
sudo: required
os:
- linux
- osx
rust:
- stable
services:
- docker
before_deploy: "./build-release myapp ${TRAVIS_TAG}-${TRAVIS_OS_NAME}"
deploy:
  provider: releases
  api_key:
    secure: "..."
  file_glob: true
  file: "myapp-${TRAVIS_TAG}-${TRAVIS_OS_NAME}.*"
  skip_cleanup: true
  on:
    rust: stable
    tags: true

Next, copy build-release⁠ into your project and run chmod +x build-release.

When you push a new tag to your project, build-release will automatically build new Linux binaries using the Omnijar Rust builder, and new Mac binaries with Cargo, and it will upload both to the GitHub releases page for your repository.

For a working example, see faradayio/conductor⁠.

⁠License

MIT license⁠.