zstd-sfx is a project to compress data into a self-extracting executable with zstd compression algorithm. This project is composed of two components: archiver and unarchiver, the archiver would compress the data and combine with the unarchiver, into a single executable.

The usage of the archiver is shown below

Usage: archiver <target> <unarchiver> [-l <level>] [-o <output>] [-r] [-t <temp>]

Positional Arguments:
  target            what to compress
  unarchiver        path to unarchiver executable

Options:
  -l, --level       zstd compress level, range from 0~23, default is 3
  -o, --output      path to output sfx file, default is target name
  -r, --root        the root directory with be included or not
  -t, --temp        where temp files should be store, default depends on os
  --help            display usage information

To use zstd-sfx, you can download the pre-compiled binaries here. Or you can compile by yourself, make sure you have rust toolchain and git installed first, you'll need to download the source code with git

git clone https://github.com/phoxwupsh/zstd-sfx.git

Then build unarchiver first

cd zstd-sfx
cargo build --bin=unarchiver --release

After you build the unarchiver, the executable file would be target/release/unarchiver in the project directory (for Windows is /target/release/unarchiver.exe)

So you can compress the data like this

Unix

cargo run --bin=archiver --release -- some/path/to/data target/release/unarchiver -o sfx-executable

Windows

cargo run --bin=archiver --release -- some/path/to/data target/release/unarchiver.exe -o sfx-executable.exe

If the executable file size of unarchiver is a concern for you, you can do some trick to shrink it.

First you would need rust nightly

rustup install nightly

Then you can compile it with

Unix

# Find your host's target
rustc -vV
RUSTFLAGS="-Zlocation-detail=none -Zfmt-debug=none" cargo +nightly build -Z build-std=std,panic_abort -Z build-std-features=panic_immediate_abort --target x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu --bin=unarchiver --release

Windows

$env:RUSTFLAG="-Zlocation-detail=none -Zfmt-debug=none"
cargo +nightly build -Z build-std=std,panic_abort -Z build-std-features=panic_immediate_abort --target x86_64-pc-windows-msvc --bin=unarchiver --release

For more information, refer to johnthagen/min-sized-rust