static-haskell-nix

This builds an example executable (originally from https://github.com/vaibhavsagar/experiments) with nix,

creating a fully static executable (ldd says not a dynamic executable)
to make that possible, it and all dependencies (including ghc) are built against musl instead of glibc

Originally inspired by this comment.

Building

NIX_PATH=nixpkgs=https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/2c07921cff84dfb0b9e0f6c2d10ee2bfee6a85ac.tar.gz nix-build --no-out-link

This prints a path that contains the fully linked static executable in the bin subdirectory.

Binary caches for faster building (optional)

On non-NixOS

You can use the binary cache shown in here to not have to build lots of native dependencies against musl, and you can use my binary nix closure mentioned here to not have to build GHC.

On NixOS

Install cachix and run cachix use static-haskell-nix before your nix-build.

Building arbitrary packages

The static-stack directory shows how to build a fully static stack executable (a Haskell package with many dependencies), and makes it reasonably easy to build other packages as well.

The survey directory maintains a select set of Haskell executables that are known and not known to work with this approach; contributions are welcome to grow the set of working executables. Run for example:

NIX_PATH=nixpkgs=https://github.com/nh2/nixpkgs/archive/50677e464359947f2a71cfd497c4022e3cdf8c7d.tar.gz nix-build --no-link survey/default.nix -A working

There are multiple package sets available in the survey (select via -A):