Installation script

[microbecode]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

Our project relies on asdf to install some tooling. So, in our docs, we have to instruct users to install asdf. Unfortunately, there is no platform-agnostic, easy way to install asdf and users have to somehow figure out what to install and how.

Describe the proposed solution

Write a script that detects the used platform and installs asdf accordingly. For example, to install Rust, one just needs to run curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh and the installation script takes care of the rest.

Describe similar asdf features and why they are not sufficient

Using existing asdf installation functionality users have to be quite tech-savvy. Most of our users just want to run a simple command to get things working and we don't want to require them to know a lot about this kind of things.

Describe other workarounds you've considered

This is already implemented, at least somewhat, in some other tooling that requires asdf. Here's an example: https://github.com/software-mansion/starkup/blob/3bf84fda390bbcfe6c85b4ab88d58f463ce71f93/starkup.sh#L356

We considered maintaining a similar script by ourselves, but if would be much nicer if there was an official script we could use.

[jthegedus]

Thanks for the suggestion. This was actually raised a few years ago. Here is the discussion for context

I don't think we should adopt this pattern. I know it's popular but it has some risks and I don't think we should push our users in this direction.
See:

• sysdig.com/blog/friends-dont-let-friends-curl-bash
• seancassidy.me/dont-pipe-to-your-shell.html
• news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12766049

source - #739 (comment)

Although the fundamental issue is still present, we do now have binaries for most platforms, which may make this more amenable to the team, so I will leave this open to discussion.

[Stratus3D]

I guess my issue with this now is that we've got 4 available install methods. Some users won't want to use an install script due to security risk, so we'll need to keep all the existing install methods. This would introduce a 5th option. Hence why I've rejected things like #1858.

Homebrew and AUR are really nice, I've switched to them myself and I'd recommend them to everyone. Of course manual configuration is still required so that's a downside to using a package manager. Because everyone's shell setup varies install scripts can grow to be very sophisticated. I personally don't have the bandwidth to handle maintaining an install script, so unless an existing maintainer wants to volunteer to own the install script I don't think it's something we'll be adding.

[Stratus3D]

Another recent goal of mine is to minimize the amount of Bash code I have to maintain. An install script would need to be a shell script.

[ylishev]

I have the same issue, as the most version managers that I personally currently use and want to replace are installed like:

curl -s -S -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/moovweb/gvm/master/binscripts/gvm-installer | bash

and

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/$(NVM_VERSION)/install.sh | bash

That works fine for:

• local development
• build in Docker (with Alpine)
• build in CI

Tools like curl or wget and bash are available widely (including Alpine) and are easier to install.

Right now, if I have to adopt asdf then I have write my own version of such install script, as I guess everyone that needs this.

In order for the different pipelines to work fast I prefer installation from binary, instead installing if from source.

Especially, in my case where I actually want to use asdf for Go (and Node), but you get the chicken-egg problem with Go.

Otherwise understandable not to want to deal with sh/bash.

[ylishev]

Actually, we don't really need heavy bash/sh based installation script. Most of the work can be done with Go and bash/sh side to be pretty much downloading the "Go" binary for the platform (OS/ARCH) and Go to take care of installation details. So, no heavy bash/sh scripting and not dependency of Golang compiler.