BusyBox for Elixir programs

BusyBox is a C program that provides implementations of many Unix utilities in one small package. It is frequently used in embedded systems.

This Elixir module makes it available to Elixir programs on platforms that BusyBox supports. This lets you enable more BusyBox utilities than provided by the official Nerves systems.

All BusyBox programs are installed under the busybox OTP application's priv directory. See the module documentation for helpers for adding the appropriate directories to the PATH variable, running commands or finding paths to commands.

The BusyBox command list is not configurable, yet. If you would like to modify the enabled commands, look for the make_menuconfig helper script after you build once. It runs BusyBox's configuration utility using the correct paths and copies back changes. Work is needed to let you specify your own configuration in your config.exs. Please consider helping add this if you need it.

Installation

The package can be installed by adding busybox to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:busybox, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end

BusyBox or Busybox

Take a deep breath.

Upstream BusyBox uses busybox and BusyBox (mostly). We attempt to follow upstream project's spellings in our documentation. In Elixir, the convention would be to either use busy_box or Busybox. We decided that the lowercase spelling was more important to stay the same since the main executable was named busybox. Therefore, to stay consistent with Elixir conventions, the main module is named Busybox.

Licenses

BusyBox is covered by the GNU General Public License version 2. Please see the BusyBox source and website for details.

All Elixir code and infrastructure in this repository that's not BusyBox is covered by the MIT license.