JARify: transmutation of native binaries into JVM apps

Give jarify a dynamically linked executable launch-missiles, out comes a standalone JVM application launch-missiles.jar. You can run it with

$ java -jar launch-missiles.jar

The resulting JAR does not fork launch-missiles in a separate process when run. It is dynamically loaded into the same address space as the JVM spawned by java and can therefore call into the JVM (e.g. using the JNI).

Building it

Requirements:

• the Stack build tool (version 1.2 or above);
• either, the Nix package manager,
• or, OpenJDK and Gradle installed globally on your system.

To build and copy jarify to ~/.local/bin:

$ stack build --copy-bins

You can optionally get Stack to download a JDK in a local sandbox (using Nix) for good build results reproducibility. This is the recommended way to build jarify. Alternatively, you'll need it installed through your OS distribution's package manager for the next steps (and you'll need to tell Stack how to find the JVM header files and shared libraries).

To use Nix, set the following in your ~/.stack/config.yaml (or pass --nix to all Stack commands, see the Stack manual for more):

nix:
  enable: true

Usage

Any position independent (dynamically linked) executable (PIE) can be transmutated in this way:

$ jarify <FILE>

On OS X, all executables are PIE.

To create a PIE on Linux and other platforms, pass the -pie flag to the linker. Currently, we furthermore require "origin processing" to be turned on. Here is the full set of options to pass to ld:

$ gcc -pie -Wl,-z,origin -Wl,-rpath,$ORIGIN ...

Some distributions create position independent executables by default (Ubuntu and Debian on some architectures).

License

Copyright (c) 2015-2017 EURL Tweag.

All rights reserved.

jarify is free software, and may be redistributed under the terms specified in the LICENSE file.

About

jarify is maintained by Tweag I/O.

Have questions? Need help? Tweet at @tweagio.