On the topic of tools, their versions & automated installations

Posted on:October 8, 2022 at 04:55 PM

Impatient? then these are the tools we will discuss

We developers love tools, we like to create them, use them and hope that they make our lives better as we are going about our day doing the things we do. You know don’t you? “Working Hard or Hardly Working” — I don’t know who said that but I use it every chance I get.

Image Generated By DALL.E 2.0

Intro

Ever since the proliferation of GitHub and releases it has been quite easy to release a tool and post the binaries as release attachments. There was some work involved, you had to create a release (some GitHub additions to git tags), and then get the upload URL and upload the assets. But there were a host of tools to help with the process, and they helped but still some fiddling was required and not everyone who had the time to do so had the itch to not only scratch to tool, but also it’s automation, or if they did they depended on tools that also were not updated if they had problems.

And then came GitHub actions, and they streamlined everything for nearly everyone to set it up once and the simply make changes, then release and the actions would take care of testing with different architectures, creating the final build, packaging and uploading the assets to the created release. Not to mention that they are now free for any public repository.

This is all great and are nice advancements to the high friction process of making software outside a large team, on your own, however what got lost in the process was the earlier ease of (sorry windows) installing nearly any required software by doing this

Table of contents

Open Table of contents

Possible Approaches

So what to do then? There’s great software out there just waiting for us to use, but not as easy to use as above? Well 2 options really

So, If you don’t want to install manually then the following tools are for you!

ASDF

Manage multiple runtime versions with a single CLI tool

It’s simple really, let’s go though

That’s it GitHub cli should be available, try running gh to check

Here you can find all the plugins available, there are many and now available for you to use.

To create plugins is not that difficult either, see here, there are even some plugins that I’ve created just search for comdotinux there.

asdf allows to have different versions of tools in different directories and simply switching to them change to those versions.

AFX

AFX is a command-line package manager. afx can allow us to manage almost all things available on GitHub, Gist and so on.

So Let’s Go

github:

- name: stedolan/jq
  description: Command-line JSON processor
  owner: stedolan
  repo: jq
  release:
  name: jq
  tag: jq-1.6
  command:
  link:

  - from: '\*jq\*'
    to: jq

That’s it jq is installed, updating is also easy, update the version, run afx install.
To uninstall, remove the section from yaml and run afx uninstall

AFX Sample Config

Here’s my current config yaml, as you can see it’s much easier to install mostly anything with afx, like prettyping which does not have a release but is a shell script that you can install using afx

github:
  - name: b4b4r07/enhancd
    description: A next-generation cd command with your interactive filter
    owner: b4b4r07
    repo: enhancd
    plugin:
      env:
        ENHANCD_FILTER: fzf --height 25% --reverse --ansi:fzy
      sources:
        - init.sh
  - name: cantino/mcfly
    description: fly through your shell history
    owner: cantino
    repo: mcfly
    release:
      name: mcfly
      tag: v0.6.1
    command:
      link:
        - from: "*mcfly*"
          to: mcfly
    plugin:
      sources:
        - eval "$(mcfly init zsh)"
  - name: bootandy/dust
    description: du + rust
    owner: bootandy
    repo: dust
    release:
      name: dust
      tag: v0.8.3
      asset:
        filename: "{{ .Release.Name }}-{{ .Release.Tag }}-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz"
    command:
      link:
        - from: "dust-v0.8.3-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/*dust*"
          to: dust
  - name: ogham/dog
    description: better dig
    owner: ogham
    repo: dog
    release:
      name: dog
      tag: v0.1.0
      asset:
        filename: "{{ .Release.Name }}-{{ .Release.Tag }}-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.zip"
    command:
      link:
        - from: "bin/*dog*"
          to: digdog
    plugin:
      sources:
        - completions/dog.zsh
  - name: denilsonsa/prettyping
    description: prettyping is a wrapper around the standard ping tool with the objective of making the output prettier, more colorful, more compact, and easier to read.
    owner: denilsonsa
    repo: prettyping
    command:
      link:
        - from: prettyping
          to: prettyping
  - name: tstack/lnav
    description: advanced log file viewer for the terminal. It can quickly parse and index log files and display them in a single combined view with syntax highlighting.
    owner: tstack
    repo: lnav
    release:
      name: lnav
      tag: v0.11.1
      asset:
        filename: "lnav-0.11.1-musl-64bit.zip"
    command:
      link:
        - from: "lnav-0.11.1/lnav"
          to: lnav
  - name: mifi/lossless-cut
    description: LosslessCut aims to be the ultimate cross platform FFmpeg GUI for extremely fast and lossless operations on video, audio, subtitle and other related media files.
    owner: mifi
    repo: lossless-cut
    release:
      name: lossless-cut
      tag: v3.47.1
      asset:
        filename: "LosslessCut-linux-x64.tar.bz2"
    command:
      link:
        - from: "*LosslessCut-linux-x64/losslesscut"
          to: losslesscut

Here is my Gist (Sometimes not shown properly when embedded)

Image generated by DALL.E 2.0 that shows nicely arranged tools

Extro

Now you should have a nice control over your tools and moreover easy to spread the love <3
So where did I get to know about these tools? A very good Question, most are from the excellent and relatively (to my knowledge) unknown blog post.
Command Line for the 21. Century: The Low Hanging Fruit

Next Steps?