FDfdgdd·Jan 26, 2026
Exodus (https://github.com/intoli/exodus) used to be good for this but is giving me a Python error these days.
In The Holy Grail of Linux Binary Compatibility: Musl and Dlopenintoli
exodus
Python2018–2026
intoli / exodus
exodus
Painless relocation of Linux binaries–and all of their dependencies–without containers.
15Distinct people
19Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3KGitHub stars
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What it is
Painless relocation of Linux binaries–and all of their dependencies–without containers.
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This week on Hacker News
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Observed mentions: 2018-02-01 13:31:01 UTC to 2026-01-26 22:32:06 UTC.
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| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 2 | 8 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
19 sourcesExodus – Painless relocation of Linux binaries and all of their dependencies
2 points · Open discussionNot the OP but what sometimes works is as easy as:
```
ldd your-binary
```
on the old host and then copy all the thing that is referenced, put into ./foo and then start like so on new host: `LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./foo ./your-binary`. (may include typos, from memory)
A great tool for this used to be https://github.com/intoli/exodus - not sure if it still works.
Disclaimer: Also please don't do this with network-facing services, security applies, etc.pp. but it's a good trick to know.
In The tragedy of running an old Node projectCOPY --from=ugit-ops /usr/lib/libpcre* /usr/lib/
COPY --from=ugit-ops /usr/lib/libreadline* /usr/lib/
COPY --from=ugit-ops /lib/libc.musl-* /lib/
COPY --from=ugit-ops /lib/ld-musl-* /lib/
No, what I'm saying is you're blanket copying fully different versions of common library files into operating system lib folders as shown above, possibly breaking OS lib symlinks and/or wholly overwriting OS lib files themselves in the process for _current_ versions used in Alpine OS if they exist now or in the future, potentially destroying OS lib dependencies, and also overwriting the ones possibly included in the future by Alpine OS itself to get your statically copied versions of the various CLI tools your shell script needs to work. The same goes for copying bash, tr, git, and other binaries to OS bin folders. No No NO!
That is _insanely_ shortsight
Read the rest
ed. There's a safe way to do that and then there is the way you did it. If you want to learn to do it right and are deadset against static binary versions of those tools for the sake of file size, look at how Exodus does it so that they don't destroy OS bin folders and library dependency files in the process of making a binary able to be moved from one OS to another.
Exodus: https://github.com/intoli/exodus
This is why I'm saying your resulting docker image is incredibly fragile and something I would never depend on long-term as it's almost guaranteed to crash and burn as Alpine OS upgrades OS bins and lib dependency files in the future. That it works now in this version is an aberration at best and in reality, there probably are things that are broken in Alpine OS that you aren't even aware of because you may not be using the functionality you broke yet.
OS package managers handle dependencies for a reason.
Jokes aside, this is a actually a pretty common scenario for some people, and I wrote a tool called Exodus to solve it [1]. Exodus makes it trivial to relocate Linux binaries like jq from your local machine [1]. You can simply run
exodus jq | ssh my-server
locally, and then immediately have access to jq on the server. I personally find it very useful when working with servers or containers that have limited package repositories or where I don't have root access.
[1] - https://github.com/intoli/exodus
In Jqjq: Jq Implementation of JqExodus?
Exodus – relocation of Linux binaries–and all of their deps–without containers - https://github.com/intoli/exodus
In FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)I'll just drop these here as they might be useful to you
https://github.com/xxh/xxh
https://github.com/intoli/exodus
In Exa - A Modern Replacement for lsExodus – relocation of Linux binaries–and all of their deps–without containers
307 points · Open discussionI have used exodus to do this in the past. https://github.com/intoli/exodus
In Oasis: a small statically-linked Linux systemI am not sure how this would work. rsh/ssh may be involved. I wouldn't even know how to express:
ssh carthoris ls /mnt/media/Movies | grep Spider
(this is just an example). Note that in this example, we
have two processes running on two different machines.
Indeed, the OSs and systems on these machines may be, um...
different. Indeed, I routinely include "cloud" machines
in pipelines. Indeed, with ssh, the -Y (or -X) option can
introduce a GUI to a part of the command.
I have wished that shar was part of SUS. Also, I find that
"exodus" is useful (across Linux anyway -- the systems have
to be "reasonably" homogenous). https://github.com/intoli/exodus
In CLI: ImprovedI can definitely understand you cringing about the re-encoding, but I just wanted to point out that the reason that we took this approach was simply to give a semi-plausible real-world example of how tools like aws-serverless-express [1] and Exodus [2] can be used to build useful APIs with AWS Lambda [3] and AWS Gateway [4]. These articles are primarily meant to be educational tutorials that people can use as a reference when writing and deploying their own APIs. The whole "converting to MP3" thing is just an easily understandable premise which lays out a clear goal for the tutorials to build upon.
[1] - https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless-express
[2] - https://github.com/intoli/exodus
[3] - https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/
[4] - https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/
In Building a YouTube MP3 Downloader with Exodus, FFmpeg, and AWS LambdaFor relocatable ELF binaries, there's also https://github.com/intoli/exodus
In Tarballs, the ultimate container image formatI think you should look at https://github.com/intoli/exodus
> Painless relocation of Linux binaries–and all of their dependencies–without containers.
> Exodus handles bundling all of the binary's dependencies, compiling a statically linked wrapper for the executable that invokes the relocated linker directly.
In A static binary rewriter that does not use heuristicsThis is awesome! The how it works section was an interesting read.
https://github.com/intoli/exodus/blob/master/README.md#how-i...
In Exodus – Painless relocation of Linux binaries without containersExodus – Painless relocation of Linux binaries without containers
41 points · Open discussionShowing the 15 most recent of 19 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.