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Pavel Evstigneev
Pavel Evstigneev

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Making portable binary for MacOS

#macos #portable #development

Let’s say we want to take some binary and prepare it for distribution (unsigned), here is how we can make it portable with example of psql

Copy executable file 

# cp /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/latest/bin/psql .
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Check linked libraries 

# otool -L psql psql: /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/13/lib/libpq.5.dylib (compatibility version 5.0.0, current version 5.13.0) /usr/lib/libedit.3.dylib (compatibility version 2.0.0, current version 3.0.0) /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1281.0.0)
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We can see psql has dependency on libpq.5.dylib

Copy required dylib’s 

# cp /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/latest/lib/libpq.5.13.dylib .
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Check dependencies of libpq.5.13.dylib 

# otool -L libpq.5.13.dylib libpq.5.13.dylib: /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/13/lib/libpq.5.dylib (compatibility version 5.0.0, current version 5.13.0) /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/13/lib/libssl.1.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.1.0, current version 1.1.0) /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/13/lib/libcrypto.1.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.1.0, current version 1.1.0) /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1281.0.0)
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Copy libssl.1.1.dylib, libcrypto.1.1.dylib and their dependencies (if any) 

# ls libcrypto.1.1.dylib libssl.1.1.dylib libpq.5.13.dylib psql
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Use install_name_tool to change dependencies paths to @loader_path/....

More details about @loader_path

install_name_tool -change /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/13/lib/libssl.1.1.dylib @loader_path/libssl.1.1.dylib ./libpq.5.13.dylib install_name_tool -change /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/13/lib/libcrypto.1.1.dylib @loader_path/libcrypto.1.1.dylib ./libpq.5.13.dylib install_name_tool -change /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/13/lib/libcrypto.1.1.dylib @loader_path/libcrypto.1.1.dylib ./libssl.1.1.dylib install_name_tool -change /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/13/lib/libpq.5.dylib @loader_path/libpq.5.13.dylib ./psql
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Try to run psql

If you run this on Macos Catalina, it will be killed by system

# ./psql [1] 2490 killed ./psql
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It happens because those binaries was signed but modified them, and signature check started to fail

Let’s remove code signing 

codesign --remove-signature *
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If binary is not signed we may need to remove quarantine flag

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine *
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Try again 

# ./psql psql (13.0, server 10.14) Type "help" for help. myname=#
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It works 👏

I use this technique in Postbird.app - Free Cross-platform Desktop Client for PostgreSQL

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