nixstall

Generic installer on *nix platform for the packages that are not listed/updated in your favourite package manager.

Install just about anything from the url using the following command:

nixstall get http://somesite.com/package-1.2.3.zip

Or from the local filesystem using:

nixstall /path/to/package-1.2.3.zip

If it's the first time you are using nixstall, then use:

curl -L http://git.io/nixstall | bash -s get http://somesite.com/somepackage-1.2.3.zip

Features

Download and install archive from remote url or from local filesystem
Install any standard package that has bin directory
nixstall manages itself automatically. You don't even need to install it.
Developers can distribute the snippet like the following for their packages as installer. curl -L http://git.io/nixstall | bash -s get http://yoursite.com/yourpackage-1.2.3.zip
Don't need to wait for the maintainer to update the package in package manager.
PATH managed automatically

Why?

Most packages follow a simple structure

+ archive(.zip)
|--+ package-v1.0.2/
|  |--+ bin/
|  |--+ lib/
|  |--+ whatever/
|  ..

But Installation requires atleast three steps:

Download a .zip,
Extract it,
And then set the path to its bin directory in PATH environment variable in .*rc / .*profile files.

The last step is quite error prone. Do you see a pattern? These three steps can be automated into one. And that's just what nixstall does well. No more pesky PATH editing.

User guide

Let's install Ant. We know it lives here

curl -L http://git.io/nixstall | bash -s get http://archive.apache.org/dist/ant/binaries/apache-ant-1.9.3-bin.zip

This installs ant and in fact install nixstall as well. Now next time on you can use nixstall command directly and it all gets even terse when you use nixstall that's already there on your machine now:

Installing nixstall itself. Nixstall installs itself whenever you install any package for the first time. But if you want to install nixstall first :
```
 curl -L http://git.io/nixstall | bash -s self
```

Getting archive directly from the site:

 nixstall get http://archive.apache.org/dist/ant/binaries/apache-ant-1.9.3-bin.zip

Some archive that's already there on your machine:
```
 nixstall /path/to/apache-ant-1.9.3-bin.zip
```
From already extracted dir:
```
 nixstall_link /absolute/path/to/ant-1.9.3
```
This just creates symlink and does not copy content.
Listing paackages installed
```
 nixstall_list
```
Reloading path when new package is installed without opening new terminal
```
 nixstall_reload
```
Updating nixstall
```
 nixstall self
```

Note: Ant can be, of course, installed with other package managers. I have chosen ant as an example because most of us know it and its binaries are small enough to be downloaded.

Limitations

Archives must follow standard structure i.e. they must have bin directory in them.
Archives must be self contained. No post processing is supported.
You can potentially install multiple versions of same package, and all may end up in PATH

Troubleshooting

If the nixstall script or shell functions are not loaded for some reason, try: source ~/.nixstall/nixstall/bin/nixstall
If that does not exist, try one curl -sL http://git.io/nixstall | bash -s self

brennebeck / nixstall