vk

vk installs and updates single-binary programs from Github and Hashicorp.

vk is an abbreviation of værktøjskasse [ˈvæɐ̯gtʌjs-], which is a danish word meaning toolbox.

Table of contents

• Table of contents
• Getting started
• Supported tools
• Usage
• Github API rate limiting
• Problem abstract
• The solution
• Limitations
• Tool definitions

Getting started

vk is made to install tools for a single user, not system-wide. It has, for now, been hardcoded to use the directory $HOME/.local/bin. Before you start, you have to ensure this directory is present and that you modify your PATH to include it. When this has happened, go download the latest release of vk, rename the binary to just vk, move it into the directory and give it execute permission with chmod +x vk. Because vk is created just like the tools it supports, it can keep itself updated (and even uninstall itself!).

Quick install: curl -Lo ~/.local/bin/vk https://github.com/cellpointmobile/vk/releases/download/v0.2.1/vk_0.2.1_Linux_x86_64 \ && chmod +x ~/.local/bin/vk

Supported tools

Here are some tools that are supported. The list is not exhaustive and can will probably be expanded in the future.

• Ark (recently renamed to Velero)
• Dive
• Docker-compose
• Fly
• Helm
• Helmfile
• Img
• K8sec
• Kops
• Kustomize
• Minikube
• Stern
• Terraform
• terraform-docs
• tflint

Usage

To list tools that vk can install use the subcommand "available":

vk available

Optionally add the flag --all to also include already installed tools in the list.

To install a tool use the subcommand "install":

vk install minikube

To update all installed tools use the subcommand "update":

vk update

To install a specific tool only, also specify the tool in the "update" subcommand:

vk update minikube

To list installed tools use the subcommand "installed":

vk installed

To uninstall a tool use the subcommand "uninstall":

vk uninstall minikube

If you want to run update in a cronjob, there is a quiet flag you can use:

vk update --quiet

Update and install can also be forced to download and overwrite the local version with the latest version, even if the are the same:

vk [install|update] minikube --force

Bash/Zsh completion is available from the "completion" subcommand:

source <(vk completion [bash|zsh])

Github API rate limiting

vk normally talks to the Github API unauthenticated, which means it is subject to quite strict rate limiting - 60 requests per hour. If you run into this problem (vk will tell you), you can either wait an hour or add a Github personal access token to your vk config. You can create a new token here: https://github.com/settings/tokens/new. The token only needs the public_repo scope and nothing else. When you have generated a token you have to insert the following in ~/.vk/config.yaml (create it, if it does not exist):

github-api-token: YOUR-TOKEN-HERE

Problem abstract

Infrastructure engineers and architects (the sysadmins of yesteryears) who are working with cloud, containers, 12-factor etc need a bunch of modern tools to do their jobs effectively. A lot of these tools have adopted a new paradigm where they are released as single-binaries (often written in Go) on Github. This makes for a fairly easy workflow when releasing, as there are nice tools like goreleaser available that will build a binary, create a changelog and do a release on Github for you. For a single tool, this isn't too bad for a user - just go to the requisite Github repo, download the latest release, optionally extract the binary from a tarball or zipfile, copy the binary to a directory in your PATH and you are ready to work. You then have to follow along on Github to be notified of new releases and have to go through the same steps to update your tool. This becomes quite tedious when you have more than three of these tools installed. For the most part these tools aren't packaged for systems like apt, yum or snap. And for the few tools that have unofficial packages, these are rarely kept up-to-date. Quite a bit of these tools do have brew formulas available, which does somewhat mitigate the problem. However not all tools have formulas available, and brew for Linux requires a lot to run, while also mostly ending up with your machine compiling the tools itself, if they even work.

The solution

vk is a simple tool that can download, extract, install, update and uninstall these types of tools. It does so by talking to the Github (and Hashicorps Checkpoint) API for information about the latest release, which it can check against the version that is installed locally. For a user it is easy, convenient and fast to install and keep up-to-date these tools with vk.

Limitations

vk is not a full blown package manager. It can not install specific versions of tools, only the latest version. vk is also only for Linux AMD64 platforms (for now).

Tool definitions

All tools that vk knows about are defined in a JSON file in the vk-definitions Github repo (https://github.com/cellpointmobile/vk-definitions).