postject VS ltools

My team is working on this problem in the context of creating Node.js single-executable applications. While the naive approach of just appending data at the end of the binary works, it is not friendly with code-signature in macOS and Windows given that signing operates on PE and Mach-O sections.

We have recently open-sourced a small tool called Postject (https://github.com/postmanlabs/postject), which is able to inject arbitrary data as proper ELF/Mach-O/PE sections for all major operating systems (with AIX support coming). The tool also provides C/C++ cross-platform headers for easily traversing the final binary and introspect whether the segment is present or not.

The tool is based on the LIEF (https://github.com/lief-project/LIEF) project.

At Postman, we are making use of this on our custom Node.js single-executable applications and soon on our custom Electron.js builds too.

https://github.com/jochenleidner/ltools/blob/main/src/bin/bi...

What I found is that many compilers don't like to compile very large source files; so if the binaries you'd like to integrate are big, it might be better to integrate their constituent objects one by one (if applicable).

> I wish binary inclusion was provided by more languages or build systems. For small files it's a very suitable alternative to the difficulties of packaging resources when distributing an application or library.

When it occasionally comes up as a need, I use the bintosrc command available at https://github.com/jochenleidner/ltools