HOW TO: making a portable binary with swift

Over the weekend I was working with Vapor, trying it out and learning a bit about the libraries. Vapor leverages a library called LibreSSL to provide TLS to web services, so when you compile the project, you get a binary and a dynamic library that it uses.

The interesting part here is that if you move the directory that contains the “built bits”, the program ceases to function, reporting an error that it can’t find the dynamic library. You can see this in my simple test case, with the code from https://github.com/heckj/vaportst.

git clone https://github.com/heckj/vaportst
swift build -c release
mv .build/release newlocation
./newlocation/App version

then throws an error:

dyld: Library not loaded: /Users/heckj/src/vaportst/.build/release/libCLibreSSL.dylib
 Referenced from: /Users/heckj/src/vaportst/newlocation/App
 Reason: image not found
Abort trap: 6

It turns out that with Swift 3 (an Swift 3.1 that’s coming), the compiler adds the static path to the dynamic library, and there’s an interesting tool, called the install_name_tool that can modify that from a static path to a dynamic path.

Norio Nomura was kind enough to give me the exact syntax:

install_name_tool -change /Users/heckj/src/vaportst/.build/release/libCLibreSSL.dylib @rpath/libCLibreSSL.dylib .build/release/App
install_name_tool -add_rpath @executable_path .build/release/App

This tool is specific to MacOS, as the linux dynamic loader works slightly differently. As long as the dynamic library is in the same directory as the binary, or the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH is set to the directory containing the dynamic libraries, it’ll get loaded just fine on Linux.

Swift today doesn’t provide a means to create a statically linked binary (it is an open feature request: SR-648). It looks like that may be an option in the future as the comments in the bug show progress towards this goal. The whole issue of dynamic loading becomes moot, at the cost of larger binaries – but it is an incredible boon when dealing with containers and particularly looking towards running “server side swift”.