View Source Precompilation guide

Rustler provides an easy way to use safer NIFs in OTP applications. But in some environments it's harder to use the benefits of the tool because every user needs to install the Rust toolchain and compile the project, which can take several minutes in some cases.

This changes with the help of the RustlerPrecompiled package. Now we can easily use precompiled Rustler NIFs from an external source.

The precompilation happens in a CI server, always in a transparent way, and the Hex package published should always include a checksum file to ensure the NIFs stays the same, therefore avoiding supply chain attacks.

In this guide I will show you how to prepare your project to use this feature.

Prepare for the build

Most of the work is done in the CI server. In this example we are going to use GitHub Actions.

The GH Actions service has the benefit of hosting artifacts for releases and make them public available.

Configure Github Actions

In order for the workflow to succeed, read and write permissions will need to be enabled for the repository.

Settings > Actions > General
Workflow permissions
Check the box "Read and write permissions"

Configure Targets

Usually we want to build for the most popular targets and the minimum NIF version supported.

NIF versions are more stable than OTP versions because they usually change only after two major releases of OTP. But older versions are compatible with newer versions if they have the same MAJOR number. For example, the NIF 2.15 is compatible with 2.16 and 2.17. So you only need to compile for 2.15 if you want to support these versions. But in case any new feature from the newer versions is needed, then you can build for both versions as well.

In Rustler - starting from v0.29 -, it's possible to control which version of NIF is active by configuring cargo features that have this format: nif_version_MAJOR_MINOR. So it's possible to define features in your project that depends on Rustler features. More details are in the "Additional configuration before build".

For this guide our targets will be the following:

OS: Linux, Windows, macOS
Architectures: x86_64, aarch64 (ARM 64 bits), arm
NIF versions: 2.15, 2.16.

In summary the build matrix looks like this:

matrix:
  nif: ["2.16", "2.15"]
  job:
    - { target: arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf , os: ubuntu-20.04 , use-cross: true }
    - { target: aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu   , os: ubuntu-20.04 , use-cross: true }
    - { target: aarch64-apple-darwin        , os: macos-12      }
    - { target: x86_64-apple-darwin         , os: macos-12      }
    - { target: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu    , os: ubuntu-20.04  }
    - { target: x86_64-unknown-linux-musl   , os: ubuntu-20.04 , use-cross: true }
    - { target: x86_64-pc-windows-gnu       , os: windows-2019  }
    - { target: x86_64-pc-windows-msvc      , os: windows-2019  }

A complete workflow example can be found in the rustler_precompilation_example project. That workflow is using a GitHub Action especially made for our goal: philss/rustler-precompiled-action. The GitHub Action will deal with the installation of cross and the build of the project, naming the files in the correct format.

Some targets are only supported by later versions of cross. For those, you might want to install cross directly from GitHub. You can see an example in this pipeline.

Additional configuration before build

In our build we are going to cross compile our crate project (the Rust code for our NIF) using a variety of targets, as we saw in the previous section. For this to work we need to guide the Rust compiler in some cases by providing additional configuration in the .cargo/config file of our project.

Here is an example of that file:

[target.'cfg(target_os = "macos")']
rustflags = [
  "-C", "link-arg=-undefined",
  "-C", "link-arg=dynamic_lookup",
]

# See https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/59302
[target.x86_64-unknown-linux-musl]
rustflags = [
  "-C", "target-feature=-crt-static"
]

# Provides a small build size, but takes more time to build.
[profile.release]
lto = true

In addition to that, we also use a tool called cross that makes the build easier for some targets (the ones using use-cross: true in our example).

For projects using Rustler before v0.29, we need to tell cross to read an environment variable from our "host machine", because cross uses containers to build our software.

So you need to create the file Cross.toml in the NIF directory with the following content:

[build.env]
passthrough = [
  "RUSTLER_NIF_VERSION"
]

Using features to control NIF version in Rustler v0.29 and above

Since Rustler v0.29, it's possible to control which NIF version is active by using cargo features. This is a replacement for the RUSTLER_NIF_VERSION env var, that is deprecated in v0.30 of Rustler.

If your project does not use anything special from newer NIF versions, then you can declare the Rustler dependency like this:

[dependencies]
rustler = { version = "0.29", default-features = false, features = ["derive", "nif_version_2_15"] }

And in the workflow file, you would specify the nif-version: 2.15 as usual.

But in case you want to have newer features from more recent versions of NIF, you can create features for your project that are used to activate rustler features. These features should follow the same naming from Rustler, because the CI action is going to use that to activate the right feature.

Here is an example of how your Cargo.toml would look like:

[dependencies]
rustler = { version = "0.29", default-features = false, features = ["derive"] }

# And then, your features.
[features]
default = ["nif_version_2_15"]
nif_version_2_15 = ["rustler/nif_version_2_15"]
nif_version_2_16 = ["rustler/nif_version_2_16"]
nif_version_2_17 = ["rustler/nif_version_2_17"]

In your code, you would use these features - like nif_version_2_17 - to control how your code is going to be compiled. You can hide some features behind these features. Even if you don't have anything behind these features, you can still introduce them if you want to activate an specific NIF version.

But again, normally it's enough to build for the lowest version supported by the OTP version that you are targeting.

The available NIF versions are the following:

2.14 - for OTP 21 and above.
2.15 - for OTP 22 and above.
2.16 - for OTP 24 and above.
2.17 - for OTP 26 and above.

The Rustler module

We need to tell RustlerPrecompiled where to find our NIF files, and we need to tell which version to use.

defmodule RustlerPrecompilationExample.Native do
  version = Mix.Project.config()[:version]

  use RustlerPrecompiled,
    otp_app: :rustler_precompilation_example,
    crate: "example",
    base_url:
      "https://github.com/philss/rustler_precompilation_example/releases/download/v#{version}",
    force_build: System.get_env("RUSTLER_PRECOMPILATION_EXAMPLE_BUILD") in ["1", "true"],
    version: version

  # When your NIF is loaded, it will override this function.
  def add(_a, _b), do: :erlang.nif_error(:nif_not_loaded)
end

This example was extracted from the rustler_precompilation_example project. RustlerPrecompiled will try to figure out the target and download the correct file for us. This will happen in compile time only.

Optionally it's possible to force the compilation by setting an env var, like the example suggests. It's also possible to force the build by using a pre release version, like 0.1.0-dev. The only requirement to force the build is to have Rustler declared as a dependency as well: {:rustler, ">= 0.0.0", optional: true}.

The release flow

Generating a checksum file

In a scenario where you need to release a Hex package using precompiled NIFs, you first need to build the release in the CI, wait for all artifacts to be available and then generate the checksum file that is MANDATORY for your package to work.

This checksum file is generated by running the following command after the build is complete:

$ mix rustler_precompiled.download YourRustlerModule --all --print

With the module I used for this guide, the command would be:

$ mix rustler_precompiled.download RustlerPrecompilationExample.Native --all --print

The file generated will be named checksum-Elixir.RustlerPrecompilationExample.Native.exs and it's extremely important that you include this file in your Hex package (by updating the files: field in your mix.exs). Otherwise your package won't work. Your files: key at your package configuration will look like this:

defp package do
  [
    files: [
      "lib",
      "native/example/.cargo",
      "native/example/src",
      "native/example/Cargo*",
      "checksum-*.exs",
      "mix.exs"
    ],
    # ...
  ]
end

Note: you don't need to track the checksum file in your version control system (git or other).

For an example, refer to the mix.exs file of the rustler precompilation example or elixir-nx's explorer library.

Tip: use the mix hex.build --unpack command to confirm which files are being included (and if the package looks good before publishing).

Recommended flow

To recap, the suggested flow is the following:

release a new tag
push the code to your repository with the new tag: git push origin main --tags
wait for all NIFs to be built
run the mix rustler_precompiled.download task (with the flag --all)
release the package to Hex.pm (make sure your release includes the correct files).

Conclusion

The ability to use precompiled NIFs written in Rust can increase the adoption of some packages, because people won't need to have Rust installed. But this comes with some drawbacks and more responsibilities to the maintainers, so use this feature carefully.

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