Warning Sycophant is still in the alpha stages, and should not be relied upon in any capacity. Not all planned functionality is present yet, and using Sycophant in general may cause stability issues in the target process.
Sycophant is a LD_PRELOAD library that loads a python interpreter into the target process and exposes mechanisms to install hooks into arbitrary functions and inspect the running process, all from within the ease of use of python.`
Once Sycophant is built, you should have a sycophant.so library, by default it will try to import a sycophant_hooks module located in either ~/.config/sycophant or in the current working directory.
If ~/.config/sycophant exists, it will automatically be inserted into the front of the sys.path allow for various modules/hooks to be stored there and loaded with SYCOPHANT_MODULE while not needing them to be in the cwd.
You can control Sycophants behavior by setting specific environment variables, all of which are prefixed with SYCOPHANT_ and scrubbed from the environment block before the host process is invoked.
The following table lists the current supported options:
| Setting Name | Description | Value |
|---|---|---|
SYCOPHANT_MODULE |
Specify the hook module you want Sycophant to load. | string |
The python module imported by Sycophant to install hooks has a fairly simple API exposed via the sycophant module in the file itself.
It exposes a fairly simple API to allow you to insert hooks at specific addresses, search for symbols in the host process, and a few other utilities.
The following steps describe how to build Sycophant, it should be consistent for Linux, macOS, and Windows, but macOS and Windows remain untested.
NOTE: The minimum C++ standard to build Sycophant is C++17.
To build Sycophant, ensure you have the following build time dependencies:
- git
- meson
- ninja
- g++ >= 11 or clang++ >= 11
You can build Sycophant with the default options, all of which can be found in meson_options.txt. You can change these by specifying -D<OPTION_NAME>=<VALUE> at initial meson invocation time, or with meson configure in the build directory post initial configure.
To change the install prefix, which is /usr/local by default ensure to pass --prefix <PREFIX> when running meson for the first time.
In either case, simply running meson build from the root of the repository will be sufficient and place all of the build files in the build subdirectory.
Once you have configured Sycophant appropriately, to simply build and install simply run the following:
$ ninja -C build
$ ninja -C build test # Optional: Run Tests
$ ninja -C build install
This will build and install Sycophant into the default prefix which is /usr/local, to change that see the configuration steps above.
If you are building Sycophant for inclusion in a distributions package system then ensure to set DESTDIR prior to running meson install.
There is also a bugreport_url configuration option that is set to this repositories issues tracker by default, it is recommended to change it to your distributions bug tracking page.
Sycophant is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause license. The full text of the license can be found in the LICENSE file.