A simple github releases installer.

This is a simple one-liner installer for github releases. It allows your users to download and install the latest release of your program, for their specific OS and architecture, with a simple command.

Repository Setup

To use this program, your github releases should be named reponame-<OS>-<ARCH>.tar.gz under your releases directory. Note that OS and ARCH are your OS name and Architecture name, respectively. This program uses the Go standard names for OS and architecture (look at the source and it should become very clear). For an example of how things should look, see this release page for another of my projects.

Your distribution files must go in a directory named <OS>-<ARCH> inside the tarfile. This directory must contains, beside all files necessary to run your program, a shell script called install.sh that makes sure your program is properly installed in /usr/local/bin for example.

You can see examples of this in action in another of my repositories: termotp.

Usage

To use, direct your users to type one of the following commands (wget or curl):

wget:

wget -q -O/tmp/install \
  'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/marcopaganini/installer/master/install.sh' && \
  sudo sh /tmp/install YOUR-USER/YOUR-REPO

curl:

curl -s \
  'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/marcopaganini/installer/master/install.sh' >/tmp/install && \
  sudo sh /tmp/install YOUR-USER/YOUR-REPO

Replace YOUR-USER and YOUR-REPO with your github username and repository.

Restrictions

Many. This is simple program in shell that I moved to this repo, since I kept different versions of it inside my personal projects. Some notables issues.

• The program requires your release tarballs to have the same name as your repository.
• The program uses Go's OS and Architecture names (see Appendix for an example).
• The shell does some very basic heuristics to translate the output of uname -m and uname -o to Go's OS and architecture names. Feel free to email me if you find errors there.
• There's no provision to uninstall things. An easy way would be to include an "uninstall" program with your distribution, like "uninstall-yourrepo.sh" that would be copied to /usr/local/bin (by default) during installation.

Appendix

Go OS and Architecture names:

aix/ppc64        freebsd/amd64   linux/mipsle   openbsd/386
android/386      freebsd/arm     linux/ppc64    openbsd/amd64
android/amd64    illumos/amd64   linux/ppc64le  openbsd/arm
android/arm      js/wasm         linux/s390x    openbsd/arm64
android/arm64    linux/386       nacl/386       plan9/386
darwin/386       linux/amd64     nacl/amd64p32  plan9/amd64
darwin/amd64     linux/arm       nacl/arm       plan9/arm
darwin/arm       linux/arm64     netbsd/386     solaris/amd64
darwin/arm64     linux/mips      netbsd/amd64   windows/386
dragonfly/amd64  linux/mips64    netbsd/arm     windows/amd64
freebsd/386      linux/mips64le  netbsd/arm64   windows/arm