distillery

README

Distillery

Status: alpha -- things are not fully implemented, things are likely broken. Things are likely to change. Name might change, but I like dist for the binary name.

Overview

Without a doubt, homebrew has had a major impact on the macOS ecosystem. It has made it easy to install software and keep it up to date. It has been around for 15 years and while it has evolved over time, its core technology hasn't changed, and 15 year is an eternity in the tech world. I love homebrew, but I think there's room for another tool.

The goal of this project is to leverage the collective power of all the developers out there that are using tools like goreleaser and cargo-dist and many others to pre-compile their software and put their binaries up on GitHub or GitLab and install the binaries.

Install

1. Set your path export PATH=$HOME/.distillery/bin:$PATH
2. Download the latest release from the releases page
3. Extract and Run ./dist install ekristen/distillery
4. Delete ./dist and the .tar.gz, now use dist normally
5. Run dist install owner/repo to install a binary from GitHub Repository

Uninstall

1. Simply remove $HOME/.distillery/bin from your path
2. Remove $HOME/.distillery directory
3. Optionally remove cache directory (varies by OS, viewable by the info command)
4. Done

Examples

Install a specific version of a tool using @version syntax. github is the default scope, this implies github/ekristen/aws-nuke

dist install ekristen/aws-nuke@3.16.0

Install a tool from a specific owner and repository, in this case hashicorp. This will install the latest version. However, because hashicorp hosts their binaries on their own domain, distillery has special handling for obtaining the latest version from releases.hashicorp.com instead of GitHub.

dist install hashicorp/terraform

Install a binary from GitLab.

dist install gitlab/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner

Often times installing from GitHub or GitLab is sufficient, but if you are on a MacOS system and Homebrew has the binary you want, you can install it using the homebrew scope. I would generally still recommend just installing from GitHub.

dist install homebrew/opentofu

Goals

• Make it simple to install binaries on your system from multiple sources
• Do not rely on a centralized repository of metadata like package managers
• Support binary verifications and signatures if they exist
• Support multiple platforms and architectures

Supported Platforms

• GitHub
• GitLab
• Homebrew (binaries only, if anything has a dependency, it will not work at this time)
• Hashicorp

Needed Before 1.0

• make defaults configurable (bin directory for example)
• implement signature verification
• implement uninstall
• implement cleanup

Behaviors

• Caching of HTTP calls where possible (GitHub primarily)
• Caching of downloads
• Allow for multiple versions of a binary using tool@version syntax
• Running installation for any version will automatically update the default symlink to that version (i.e. switching versions)

Directory Structure

• Binaries
  • Symlinks $HOME/.distillery/bin (this should be in your $PATH variable)
  • Binaries $HOME/.distillery/opt (this is where the raw binaries are stored and symlinked to)
    • source/owner/repo/version/<binaries>
      • example: github/ekristen/aws-nuke/v2.15.0/aws-nuke
      • example: hashicorp/terraform/v0.14.7/terraform
• Cache directory (downloads, http caching)
  • MacOS $HOME/Library/Caches/distillery
  • Linux $HOME/.cache/distillery
  • Windows $HOME/AppData/Local/distillery