ekristen/distillery

like homebrew but with less fizz. install binaries as fast and as easy as possible. no package manager, no recipes or metadata to update, just install and go

Distillery

Overview

Without a doubt, homebrew has had a major impact on the macOS and even the linux ecosystem. It has made it easy to install software and keep it up to date. However, it has been around for 15+ years and while it has evolved over time, its core technology really hasn't changed, and 15+ years is an eternity in the tech world. Languages like Go and Rust have made it easy to compile binaries and distribute them without complicated installers or dependencies. I love homebrew, but I think there's room for another tool.

distillery is a tool that is designed to make it easy to install binaries on your system from multiple different sources. It is designed to be simple and easy to use. It is NOT designed to be a package manager or handle complex dependencies, that's where homebrew shines.

The goal of this project is to install binaries by 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.

Documentation

Full Documentation

Features

• Simple to install binaries on your system from multiple sources
• No reliance on a centralized repository of metadata like package managers
• Support multiple platforms and architectures
• Support private repositories (this was a feature removed from homebrew)
• Support checksum verifications (if they exist)
• Support signatures verifications (if they exist)

Quickstart

See full documentation at Installation

Note: the installation script DO NOT CURRENTLY try to modify your path, you will need to do that manually.

MacOS/Linux

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://get.dist.sh | sh

Windows

iwr https://get.dist.sh/install.ps1 -useb | iex

Adjust Your Path

MacOS/Linux

export PATH=$HOME/.distillery/bin:$PATH`

Windows

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("Path", "C:\Users\<username>\.distillery\bin;" + $env:Path, [EnvironmentVariableTarget]::User)

Behaviors

• 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)
• Caching of HTTP calls where possible (GitHub primarily)
• Caching of downloads

Running install always updates default symlink

Note: this might change before exiting beta.

Whenever you run install the default symlink will always be updated to whatever version you specify. This is to make it easy to switch versions.

Multiple Versions

Every time you run install it will by default seek out the latest version, it will not remove any other versions. All versions are symlinked with the suffix @version this means you can have multiple versions installed at the same time.

It also means you can call any version any time using the @version syntax or if you are using something like direnv you can set aliases in your .envrc file for specific versions.

Example

alias terraform="terraform@1.8.5"

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 or GitLab directly.

dist install homebrew/opentofu

Supported Sources

• GitHub
• GitLab
• Homebrew (binaries only, if anything has a dependency, it will not work at this time)
• Hashicorp (special handling for their releases, pointing to GitHub repos will automatically pass through)
• Kubernetes (special handling for their releases, pointing to GitHub repos will automatically pass through)

Authentication

Distillery supports authentication for GitHub and GitLab. There are CLI options to pass in a token, but the preferred method is to set the DISTILLERY_GITHUB_TOKEN or DISTILLERY_GITLAB_TOKEN environment variables using a tool like direnv.

Directory Structure

This is the default directory structure that distillery uses. Some of this can be overridden via the configuration.

• 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

Caching

At the moment there are two discrete caches. One for HTTP requests and one for downloads. The HTTP cache is used to store the ETag and Last-Modified headers from the server to determine if the file has changed. The download cache is used to store the downloaded file. The download cache is not used to determine if the file has changed, that is done by the HTTP cache.

If you need to delete your cache simply run dist info identify the cache directory and remove it.

Note: I may add a cache clear command in the future.