Statically linking cross-compiled Nix packages

README.md

Combining staticPkgs with crossPkgs

Downloading nixpkgs allows you to easily cross-compile Nix packages with

nix build .#pkgsCross.architecture.packageName

Where architecture is the target architecture you are cross-compiling to (like aarch64-multiplatform), and packageName is the package you are building (traceroute in this example).

This will output the package output to ./result which should include your output binary in ./result/bin . This output binary typically dynamically linked, but what if we need to cross-compile AND statically link the output binary? We can use pkgsStatic to achieve this:

nix build .#pkgsCross.aarch64-multiplatform.pkgsStatic.traceroute

We could also write a small flake like static-traceroute.nix as shown below and build it with:

nix build -f ./static-traceroute.nix

static-traceroute.nix

{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {} }:

let
  crossPkgs = pkgs.pkgsCross.aarch64-multiplatform;
  staticPkgs = crossPkgs.pkgsStatic;

  staticTraceroute = staticPkgs.traceroute.overrideAttrs (oldAttrs: {
    # Additional configurations or overrides for static building
  });
in
staticTraceroute