rathole/docs/build-guide.md

Build Guide

This is for those who want to build rathole themselves, possibly because the need of latest features or the minimal binary size.

Build

To use default build settings, run:

cargo build --release

You may need to pre-install openssl dependencies in Unix-like systems.

Customize the Build

rathole comes with lots of crate features that determine whether a certain feature will be compiled or not. Supported features can be checked out in [features] of Cargo.toml.

For example, to build rathole with the client and noise feature:

cargo build --release --no-default-features --features client,noise

Rustls Support

rathole provides optional rustls support. It's an almost drop-in replacement of native-tls support. (See Transport for more information.)

To enable this, disable the default features and enable rustls feature. And for websocket feature, enable websocket-rustls feature as well.

You can also use command line option for this. For example, to replace all default features with rustls:

cargo build --release --no-default-features --features server,client,rustls,noise,websocket-rustls,hot-reload

Feature rustls and websocket-rustls cannot be enabled with native-tls and websocket-native-tls at the same time, as they are mutually exclusive. Enabling both will result in a compile error.

(Note that default features contains native-tls and websocket-native-tls.)

Minimalize the binary

1. Build with the minimal profile

The release build profile optimize for the program running time, not the binary size.

However, the minimal profile enables lots of optimization for the binary size to produce a much smaller binary.

For example, to build rathole with client feature with the minimal profile:

cargo build --profile minimal --no-default-features --features client

2. strip and upx

The binary that step 1 produces can be even smaller, by using strip and upx to remove the symbols and compress the binary.

Like:

strip rathole
upx --best --lzma rathole

At the time of writting the build guide, the produced binary for x86_64-unknown-linux-glibc has the size of 574 KiB, while frpc has the size of ~10 MiB, which is much larger.