Eget is the best way to easily get pre-built binaries for your favorite
tools. It downloads and extracts pre-built binaries from releases on GitHub. To
use it, provide a repository and Eget will search through the assets from the
latest release in an attempt to find a suitable prebuilt binary for your
system. If one is found, the asset will be downloaded and Eget will extract the
binary to the current directory. Eget should only be used for installing
simple, static prebuilt binaries, where the extracted binary is all that is
needed for installation. For more complex installation, you may use the
--download-only
option, and perform extraction manually.
For software maintainers, if you provide prebuilt binaries on GitHub, you can
list eget
as a one-line method for users to install your software.
Eget has a number of detection mechanisms and should work out-of-the-box with most software that is distributed via single binaries on GitHub releases. First try using Eget on your software, it may already just work. Otherwise, see the FAQ a clear set of rules to make your software compatible with Eget.
For more in-depth documentation, see DOCS.md.
eget zyedidia/micro --tag nightly
eget jgm/pandoc --to /usr/local/bin
eget junegunn/fzf
eget neovim/neovim
eget ogham/exa
eget --system darwin/amd64 sharkdp/fd
eget BurntSushi/ripgrep
eget -f eget.1 zyedidia/eget
eget zachjs/sv2v
eget https://go.dev/dl/go1.17.5.linux-amd64.tar.gz --file go --to ~/go1.17.5
eget --all --file '*' ActivityWatch/activitywatch
Before you can get anything, you have to get Eget. If you already have Eget and want to upgrade, use eget zyedidia/eget
.
curl -o eget.sh https://zyedidia.github.io/eget.sh
shasum -a 256 eget.sh # verify with hash below
bash eget.sh
Or alternatively (less secure):
curl https://zyedidia.github.io/eget.sh | sh
You can then place the downloaded binary in a location on your $PATH
such as /usr/local/bin
.
To verify the script, the sha256 checksum is 0e64b8a3c13f531da005096cc364ac77835bda54276fedef6c62f3dbdc1ee919
(use shasum -a 256 eget.sh
after downloading the script).
One of the reasons to use eget is to avoid running curl into bash, but unfortunately you can't eget eget until you have eget.
Pre-built binaries are available on the releases page.
Install the latest released version:
go install github.com/zyedidia/eget@latest
or install from HEAD:
git clone https://github.com/zyedidia/eget
cd eget
make build # or go build (produces incomplete version information)
A man page can be generated by cloning the repository and running make eget.1
(requires pandoc). You can also use eget
to download the man page: eget -f eget.1 zyedidia/eget
.
The PROJECT
argument passed to Eget should either be a GitHub repository,
formatted as user/repo
, in which case Eget will search the release assets, a
direct URL, in which case Eget will directly download and extract from the
given URL, or a local file, in which case Eget will extract directly from the
local file.
If Eget downloads an asset called xxx
and there also exists an asset called
xxx.sha256
or xxx.sha256sum
, Eget will automatically verify that the
SHA-256 checksum of the downloaded asset matches the one contained in that
file, and abort installation if a mismatch occurs.
When installing an executable, Eget will place it in the current directory by
default. If the environment variable EGET_BIN
is non-empty, Eget will
place the executable in that directory.
Directories can also be specified as files to extract, and all files within them will be extracted. For example:
eget https://go.dev/dl/go1.17.5.linux-amd64.tar.gz --file go --to ~/go1.17.5
GitHub limits API requests to 60 per hour for unauthenticated users. If you
would like to perform more requests (up to 5,000 per hour), you can set up a
personal access token and assign it to the environment variable GITHUB_TOKEN
when running Eget. Eget will read this variable and send the token as
authorization with requests to GitHub.
Usage:
eget [OPTIONS] PROJECT
Application Options:
-t, --tag= tagged release to use instead of latest
--pre-release include pre-releases when fetching the latest version
--to= move to given location after extracting
-s, --system= target system to download for (use "all" for all choices)
-f, --file= glob to select files for extraction
--all extract all candidate files
-q, --quiet only print essential output
--download-only stop after downloading the asset (no extraction)
--upgrade-only only download if release is more recent than current
version
-a, --asset= download a specific asset containing the given string; can be specified multiple times for additional
filtering
--sha256 show the SHA-256 hash of the downloaded asset
--verify-sha256= verify the downloaded asset checksum against the one provided
--rate show GitHub API rate limiting information
-v, --version show version information
-h, --help show this help message
Eget only downloads pre-built binaries uploaded to GitHub by the developers of
the repository. It does not maintain a central list of packages, nor does it do
any dependency management. Eget does not "install" executables by placing them
in system-wide directories (such as /usr/local/bin
) unless instructed, and it
does not maintain a registry for uninstallation. Eget works best for installing
software that comes as a single binary with no additional files needed (CLI
tools made in Go, Rust, or Haskell tend to fit this description).
Eget does not run any downloaded code -- it just finds executables from GitHub
releases and downloads/extracts them. If you trust the code you are downloading
(i.e. if you trust downloading pre-built binaries from GitHub) then using Eget
is perfectly safe. If Eget finds a matching asset ending in .sha256
or
.sha256sum
, the SHA-256 checksum of your download will be automatically
verified. You can also use the --sha256
or --verify-sha256
options to
manually verify the SHA-256 checksums of your downloads (checksums are provided
in an alternative manner by your download source).
At the moment Eget supports searching GitHub releases, direct URLs, and local files. If you provide a direct URL instead of a GitHub repository, Eget will skip the detection phase and download directly from the given URL. If you provide a local file, Eget will skip detection and download and just perform extraction from the local file.
Eget should work out-of-the-box with many methods for releasing software, and does not require that you build your release process for Eget in particular. However, here are some rules that will guarantee compatibility with Eget.
- Provide your pre-built binaries as GitHub release assets.
- Format the system name as
OS_Arch
and include it in every pre-built binary name. Supported OSes aredarwin
/macos
,windows
,linux
,netbsd
,openbsd
,freebsd
,android
,illumos
,solaris
,plan9
. Supported architectures areamd64
,i386
,arm
,arm64
,riscv64
. - If desired, include
*.sha256
files for each asset, containing the SHA-256 checksum of each asset. These checksums will be automatically verified by Eget. - Include only a single executable or appimage per system in each release archive.
- Use
.tar.gz
,.tar.bz2
,.tar.xz
,.tar
, or.zip
for archives. You may also directly upload the executable without an archive, or a compressed executable ending in.gz
,.bz2
, or.xz
.
If you find a bug, have a suggestion, or something else, please open an issue for discussion. Pull requests will only be accepted if they close an issue marked as "pr-approved". See DOCS.md for more in-depth documentation.