DZone
Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile
  • Manage Email Subscriptions
  • How to Post to DZone
  • Article Submission Guidelines
Sign Out View Profile
  • Post an Article
  • Manage My Drafts
Over 2 million developers have joined DZone.
Log In / Join
Refcards Trend Reports
Events Video Library
Refcards
Trend Reports

Events

View Events Video Library

Zones

Culture and Methodologies Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks
Culture and Methodologies
Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering
AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture
Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding
Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance
Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks

Last call! Secure your stack and shape the future! Help dev teams across the globe navigate their software supply chain security challenges.

Modernize your data layer. Learn how to design cloud-native database architectures to meet the evolving demands of AI and GenAI workloads.

Releasing software shouldn't be stressful or risky. Learn how to leverage progressive delivery techniques to ensure safer deployments.

Avoid machine learning mistakes and boost model performance! Discover key ML patterns, anti-patterns, data strategies, and more.

Related

  • Terraform Drift Detection at Scale: How to Catch Configuration Drift Early
  • Git Tags vs AWS Tags: A Tag-Tastic Showdown!
  • GitOps Software Development Principles – And the Benefits for the Entire Organization
  • Why GitOps Is Gaining Popularity in DevOps: A Deep Dive Into the Future of Infrastructure Management

Trending

  • Scalability 101: How to Build, Measure, and Improve It
  • Virtual Threads: A Game-Changer for Concurrency
  • Enhancing Avro With Semantic Metadata Using Logical Types
  • Beyond Microservices: The Emerging Post-Monolith Architecture for 2025
  1. DZone
  2. Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance
  3. Deployment
  4. How to Create a Statically Linked Version of git Binaries

How to Create a Statically Linked Version of git Binaries

By 
Luigi Viggiano user avatar
Luigi Viggiano
·
Feb. 28, 11 · Interview
Likes (0)
Comment
Save
Tweet
Share
11.1K Views

Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

Join For Free

Creating a statically linked version of a unix software saves you in all the circumstances where you can’t install the software as root, when you don’t have development tools on the target machine, when you cannot find a prepackaged version for the specific server, when the libraries available on a server are conflicting with the ones required by your software, etc.

Examples:

  1. The unix server that hosts this blog, provides me a restricted shell to manage mysql and public web files with minimal access privileges. On this server I periodically update WordPress and other things, and I like to keep the changes under control and backed up with git. The problem is that on this server I haven’t git binaries, and I cannot install software and libraries required.
    Having the files of my WordPress installation under git version control saved me a lot of time in the past when somebody hacked into the server and changed the php files to do nasty stuff. I was able to easily check what was exactly changed since last legitimate update with “git status” command, and restore things as before.
  2. I own a little NAS (network attached storage) which runs a mini distribution of Linux which doesn’t have a prepackaged version of git to install, nor I cannot use any package management tool like apt rpm or yum etc.

So I thought that I can compile by myself the git binaries and have them deployed on the target machine. It is possible, but there is an important note: when you build a software on a unix server, the resulting binaries are referencing the libraries installed there, so you cannot easily port the binaries between servers since they have dependencies.
What you need is a “statically linked” version of the software, which fortunately it’s not so difficult to achieve. Binaries which are statically linked are usually bigger in size and will possibly require more memory to execute, but they won’t require the specific libraries to be present on the executing computer, since the libraries code is contained in the binaries themselves.

Here is how I built a static version of git on an ubuntu virtual machine, that can be ported to other unix servers:

# let's make sure we have all we need to proceed
$ sudo apt-get install libexpat1-dev asciidoc libz-dev gettext curl

# let's create the directory to host the built artifacts
$ sudo mkdir /opt/git-1.7.4.1-static

# we are ready to download and unpack latest version of git sources
$ curl http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.7.4.1.tar.bz2 | tar xvj
$ cd git-1.7.4.1/

# then compile and install the files in the target directory we created
$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/git-1.7.4.1-static CFLAGS="${CFLAGS} -static" NO_OPENSSL=1 NO_CURL=1
$ sudo make install
$ sudo make install-doc

 

On the above commands, the thing to notice is the CFLAGS=”${CFLAGS} -static” which is used to specify that the libraries must be statically linked with the binaries.

The last thing to do is create a tarball of /opt/git-1.7.4.1-static folder and copy that on the target machine; adding the /opt/git-1.7.4.1-static/bin directory to the PATH variable and the /opt/git-1.7.4.1-static/share/man to the MANPATH variable.

If possible, it’s a good idea to keep the same installation path on target machine (/opt/git-1.7.4.1-static) since this path gets hardcoded in some git scripts during the build process. But it shouldn’t give too many problems, anyway.

 

From http://en.newinstance.it/2011/02/27/how-to-create-a-statically-linked-version-of-git-binaries/

Git

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

Related

  • Terraform Drift Detection at Scale: How to Catch Configuration Drift Early
  • Git Tags vs AWS Tags: A Tag-Tastic Showdown!
  • GitOps Software Development Principles – And the Benefits for the Entire Organization
  • Why GitOps Is Gaining Popularity in DevOps: A Deep Dive Into the Future of Infrastructure Management

Partner Resources

×

Comments

The likes didn't load as expected. Please refresh the page and try again.

ABOUT US

  • About DZone
  • Support and feedback
  • Community research
  • Sitemap

ADVERTISE

  • Advertise with DZone

CONTRIBUTE ON DZONE

  • Article Submission Guidelines
  • Become a Contributor
  • Core Program
  • Visit the Writers' Zone

LEGAL

  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy

CONTACT US

  • 3343 Perimeter Hill Drive
  • Suite 100
  • Nashville, TN 37211
  • support@dzone.com

Let's be friends: