tool-installer

README

tool-installer

tool-installer (tooli) is a tool to quickly download binaries from GitHub release pages and install them into a folder.

I wrote tool-installer to automate downloading a bunch of tools from GitHub release pages because obviously having to do that manually when setting up a new computer is tedious. It always installs the latest version and can therefore also update existing tools.

Quickstart

1. Download tool-installer from the releases page
2. Create default config: tooli create-config
3. Edit the configuration file if needed (add/remove tools)
4. Run tool-installer: tooli install
5. Wait for all tools to be installed

Please see the commands section for more details on the individual commands.

Configuration

The configuration for tool-installer is a simple JSON file with the following structure:

{
	"install_dir": "~/.local/bin",
	"tools": {
		"tool1": {
			"binaries": [
				{
					"name": "cool-binary",
					"rename_to": ""
				}
			],
			"owner": "owner1",
			"repository": "repo1",
			"linux_asset": "x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz",
			"windows_asset": "x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip",
			"description": "Very cool tool"
		},
		"tool2": {
			"binaries": [
				{
					"name": "awesome-tool",
					"rename_to": "atx"
				}
			],
			"owner": "owner2",
			"repository": "repo2",
			"linux_asset": "x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz",
			"windows_asset": "x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip",
			"description": "A tool to do stuff"
		}
	}
}

To change the installation directory, set the value of install_dir to a different path. To add or remove tools, change the entries of tools. Each entry of tools should be a struct with the entries:

• owner: Name of the GitHub account under which the repository is located
• repository: Name of the repository
• linux_asset: The name of the asset to download on Linux, leave empty if the tool does not support Linux
• windows_asset: The name of the asset to download on Windows, leave empty if the tool does not support Windows
• binaries: A list of structs where each struct has these entries:
  • name: Name of the file to extract
  • rename_to: The name which the file should have after extraction, if left empty the file is not renamed. Do not include the .exe file ending.
• description: A (short) description of what the tool does

Default configuration

The default configuration, which contains some commonly used tools, can be generated with tooli create-config --path /path/to/config.json. The --path option defaults to ~/.config/tool-installer/

Acess Token

Since GitHub's API is subject to rate limits, you should create a personal access token and set that as the GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable. This also allows you to download from (your own) private repositories.

Commands

tool-installer has only three commands:

1. install
2. create-config
3. list

install

The install command is tool-installer's primary command and used to install tools. It has 3 options:

1. --config PATH to specify a given file to be used as the config file (default: ~/.config/tool-installer/config.json)
2. --only TOOLNAME to only install/update the named tool
3. --timeout AMOUNT to set the timeout for the web requests in seconds (default 10)

The timeout parameter's default value should work fine for most tools on normal internet connection speeds. Increase it if you have a very large tool to download or a slow connection.

Note: tool-installer does not do any caching or version checks, it will always download the latest version.

create-config

The create-config command creates a valid configuration for tool-installer, containing some commonly used tools. It only takes a single parameter, --path PATH (default ~/.config/tool-installer/config.json), which can be used to specify where tool-installer should write the generated configuration file to. If the specified path already exists, tool-installer will ask you if you want to overwrite that file.

list

The list command lists the tools specified in the configuration, sorted by tool name.

FAQ

Why Go?

I wanted to evaluate if Go is a usable language and this project happened to fit because it is basically just doing a bunch of things which Go has a standard library package for.

Will there be support for downloading from other websites than just GitHub?

Maybe. Depends on how many useful single binary tools are being published by other means.

Can you add X feature?

Feel free to suggest something but most likely no, tool-installer is by design very narrow in scope. It does what I need it to do and I have no plans of going beyond that.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

Licenses for the third-party tools (only the Go compiler/standard library) used by tool-installer are listed in LICENSE-THIRD-PARTY.