nixpkgs/doc/hooks/autopatchelf.section.md
Arnout Engelen 97b0ae26f7
doc: avoid 'simply' (#266434)
While the word 'simply' is usually added to encourage readers, it often has the
opposite effect and may even appear condescending, especially when the reader
runs into trouble trying to apply the suggestions from the documentation. It is
almost always an improvement to simply drop the word from the sentence.

(there are more possible improvements like this, we can apply those in separate
PRs)
2023-11-09 21:48:05 +01:00

1.4 KiB

autoPatchelfHook

This is a special setup hook which helps in packaging proprietary software in that it automatically tries to find missing shared library dependencies of ELF files based on the given buildInputs and nativeBuildInputs.

You can also specify a runtimeDependencies variable which lists dependencies to be unconditionally added to rpath of all executables. This is useful for programs that use dlopen 3 to load libraries at runtime.

In certain situations you may want to run the main command (autoPatchelf) of the setup hook on a file or a set of directories instead of unconditionally patching all outputs. This can be done by setting the dontAutoPatchelf environment variable to a non-empty value.

By default autoPatchelf will fail as soon as any ELF file requires a dependency which cannot be resolved via the given build inputs. In some situations you might prefer to just leave missing dependencies unpatched and continue to patch the rest. This can be achieved by setting the autoPatchelfIgnoreMissingDeps environment variable to a non-empty value. autoPatchelfIgnoreMissingDeps can be set to a list like autoPatchelfIgnoreMissingDeps = [ "libcuda.so.1" "libcudart.so.1" ]; or to [ "*" ] to ignore all missing dependencies.

The autoPatchelf command also recognizes a --no-recurse command line flag, which prevents it from recursing into subdirectories.