Examples: Executable Archives

This page contains a number of example executable archives. Some archives contain links too.

Software Installer

This is a very simple example: you have a debian package, toinstall.deb, and two dependencies, dep1.deb and dep2.deb, and you want to install them on a target element.

This can be easily achieved. First, you create a start script containing the following content:

#!/bin/bash
dpkg -i *.deb

and your executable archive’s file structure looks like this:

.
|
+-- toinstall.deb
+-- dep1.deb
+-- dep2.deb
+-- auto_exec.sh

Automatic Configuration

In this example, you have two executables: client and server. You want to install both to /testsoftware, and run a script called /start which will automatically start the correct software. Whether this is the server or client application is determined by the element’s hostname, which can be set in container-based elements’ configuration windows.

Your auto_exec.sh script should like this:

#!/bin/bash
mkdir /testsoftware
cp client /testsoftware
cp server /testsoftware
cp start /

and your start script contains the following:

#!/bin/bash
cd /testsoftware

# if component is given as argument, use this. Otherwise, try to guess it from the hostname.
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
	component=$(hostname | awk '{print tolower($0)}')
else
	component=$1
fi

case $component in
	server)
		./server serve
		exit
		;;
	client)
		./client
		exit
		;;
	*)
		echo "bad component: ${component}"
		exit 1
		;;
esac

Your executable archive includes the software, start and auto_exec.sh in its root directory.

Experiment Start

By precisely timing the rextfv_upload_use actions, you can start your experiment. Let’s assume you have uploaded and executed the script from the Automatic Configuration example, and now you want to start both components.

You can do this by uploading an executable archive containing only a auto_exec.sh script with this content:

#!/bin/bash
cd /
./start

Instead of relying on automatic configuration, you can of course send any other command this way, for example:

#!/bin/bash
cd /testsoftware
./server serve

This is an easy example how you can transmit commands without any payload.

[TODO: example that does this as a script: complete experiment setup]

Packet Finder

This is a simple version of the packet manager: this script should give us a list of packages to be installed, and their URLs. In order to do this, this will be uploaded to a Debian element which is connected to the Internet.

To do this, you can use a start script which reads the to-be-installed packets from a file called toinstall in the archive directory:

#!/bin/bash
toinstall = $(cat $archive_dir/toinstall)
apt-get update
archive_setstatus "$(apt-get --print-uris -y -qq install --no-install-recommends $toinstall)"

The archive contains both toinstall and auto_exec.sh in its root directory.

After executing, this script will return a list of URLs and filenames in the custom status.

[TODO: example that uses this to create an archive like the first one]