distillery

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 and even the linux 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+ years is an eternity in the tech world.

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 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 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.

Features

• 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
• Support private repositories (this was a feature removed from homebrew)

Needed Before 1.0

• make defaults configurable (bin directory for example)
• finish bin re-org under opt/
• detect already installed versions
• implement signature verification
• implement uninstall
• implement cleanup

Install

MacOS/Linux

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

Windows

1. Set Your Path
2. Download the latest release from the releases page
3. Extract and Run .\dist.exe install ekristen/distillery
4. Delete .\dist.exe and the .zip, now use dist normally
5. Run dist install owner/repo to install a binary from GitHub Repository

Set Your Path

For Current Session

$env:Path = "C:\Users\<username>\.distillery\bin;" + $env:Path

For Current User

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

For System

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

Uninstall

1. Run dist info
2. Remove the directories listed under the cleanup section

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 Platforms

• 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)

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)[https://direnv.net/].

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

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.