arx

For those wanting to go down the self-extracting executable route, I recommend arx (it generates that sort of tarball-prepended-with-shell-script you describe) https://github.com/solidsnack/arx The `nix bundle` command can generate an arx file, which includes all of an application's dependencies. As an example, we started getting issues with an EC2 server whose image was an accumulation of changes over several years; whilst we worked on migrating to a saner setup (containers defined using Nix), as a stop-gap we got the server working again by using `nix bundle` to create an arx executable containing working versions of all the application's dependencies, which we could copy to the existing server as a drop-in replacement of the existing (broken) command.

With the new (nominally experimental) CLI, use `nix bundle --bundler github:NixOS/bundlers#toArx` (or equivalently just `nix bundle`) to build a self-extracting shell script[1], `...#toDockerImage` to build a Docker image, etc.[2,3], though there’s no direct AppImage support that I can see (would be helpful to eliminate the startup overhead caused by self-extraction). If you want a QEMU VM for a complete system rather than a set of files for a single application, use `nixos-rebuild build-vm`, though that is intended more for testing than for deployment. The Docker bundler seems to be using more general Docker-compatible infrastructure in Nixpkgs[4]. [1] https://github.com/solidsnack/arx [2] https://nixos.org/manual/nix/unstable/command-ref/new-cli/ni... [3] https://github.com/NixOS/bundlers [4] https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#sec

Reminds me of https://github.com/solidsnack/arx/ which I came across recently. I've not used it, but it sounds like it does a similar decompress-then-run approach, but using a shell script as the runner rather than a native binary.

Arx is intended to allow exactly this instant user-space install and execution: https://github.com/solidsnack/arx