sanoid-portable

Run Sanoid, Syncoid, and Findoid without installing any dependencies.

Summary

sanoid-portable is a self-contained, portable build of the Sanoid ZFS snapshot management tool. Built using APPerl (Actually Portable Perl), this self-contained, portable binary encompasses the Perl runtime, all required Perl dependencies, and the Sanoid/Syncoid/Findoid scripts themselves. This enables you to run Sanoid on any Linux or FreeBSD system without needing to install additional Perl dependencies or configure the system's Perl environment.

This is useful if you'd like to use Sanoid on an appliance-like storage system, such as TrueNAS, where standard package installations are restricted or non-ideal.

Installation

The following steps will download sanoid-portable, make it executable, transform (assimilate) it into a native binary for your system, and set up symbolic links for each tool (sanoid, syncoid, findoid):

wget https://github.com/decoyjoe/sanoid-portable/releases/latest/download/sanoid-portable
chmod +x sanoid-portable
sh ./sanoid-portable --assimilate # Transforms portable into a native binary
ln -s sanoid-portable sanoid
ln -s sanoid-portable syncoid
ln -s sanoid-portable findoid

Usage

Invoke the symbolic link:

./sanoid --help
./syncoid --help
./findoid --help

Now you just need to configure Sanoid to do what you need it to do. Refer to the Sanoid documentation for configuration instructions.

Compatibility Notes

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

In WSL you need to disable the WSLInterop binfmt interpreter that's used to launch Windows binaries from Linux:

sudo sh -c 'echo 0 > $(ls /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/WSLInterop*)'

Developing

Run the initialization script to prepare your environment to build the sanoid-portable executable on a Debian-based system:

./init.sh

Build the executable:

./build.sh

This script will download and configure APPerl, download necessary Perl modules, and build the portable Sanoid binary.

The executable gets built to output/sanoid-portable.

Credits

We stand on the shoulders of giants. Thanks to:

• jimsalterjrs/sanoid for the excellent ZFS snapshot management tool.
• G4Vi/Perl-Dist-APPerl for the tooling to create single-binary portable Perl distributions.
• jart/cosmopolitan for making truly cross-platform portable binaries possible.

Releasing a new version

The release process is fully automated via GitHub Actions. To release a new version:

1. In versions.json, increment the PackagingRevision number or if updating the Sanoid version then reset PackagingRevision back to 1.
2. Update the CHANGELOG.md to include release notes for the new version.
3. Merge the changes to the mainline branch.
4. Create a new GitHub release for the new version and add the release notes.

The GitHub release will trigger a GitHub Actions run which will build the sanoid-portable binary and attach it to the release as an artifact.

License

This project is licensed under the GPL v3.0 license - see the LICENSE file for details.