tool-sync
is a CLI tool for installing your other favourite tools from GitHub Releases.
ℹ️ DISCLAIMER:
tool-sync
is developed and maintained in free time by volunteers. The development may continue for decades or may stop tomorrow. You can use GitHub Sponsorship to support the development of this project.
tool-sync
embraces the idea that configuring your personal development
environment should be as easy as possible. And the life is pretty easy when all
the tools are simple executables.
So why not simply download all executables you use and put them in one place??? 😱
With tool-sync
, you can install all the tools you use by following three
simple steps:
- Install
tool-sync
. - Configure
tool-sync
by listing all the tools you need and specifying where to put them. - Run
tool sync
.
That's all! 🥳
Then tool-sync
does the following:
- Fetches the information about tools from GitHub Releases
- Automatically guesses the asset name from your OS for common tools
- Downloads and unpacks assets
- Copies binaries from unpacked assets to the location of your choice
tool-sync
has several distinguished features that allows you to manage your
personal toolbox easily:
- Installs the latest version of tools by default. You can easily update all your tools with a single command!
- Supports common tools that you can easily install without extra configuration
- Automatically guesses asset name from your current OS
- Configures via a simple TOML file
You can install tool-sync
directly from GitHub releases in a few steps:
- Go to the latest release.
- Download an asset for your OS.
- Unpack the
tool
executable to a desired location.
You can use cargo
to install the latest published version of tool-sync
from crates:
cargo install tool-sync
You can install the latest version of tool-sync
from sources (requires git
and cargo
):
git clone https://github.com/chshersh/tool-sync
cd tool-sync
cargo build --release
./target/release/tool --version
tool-sync
reads configuration from a file in TOML format. An example
configuration file is shown below:
# a directory to store all tools
store_directory = "~/.local/bin"
# the following tools will be installed in 'store_directory'
[bat]
[difftastic]
[exa]
[fd]
[ripgrep]
By default tool-sync
reads configuration from ~/.tool.toml
but you can put
the content in any place and specify the path via the --config
flag.
You can also quickly copy the above configuration to the default path by running the following command (Unix-only):
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chshersh/tool-sync/main/example-tool-sync-config.toml > ~/.tool.toml
The above example config lists some tools natively supported by tool-sync
and
therefore they don't require extra configuration.
To specify a tool not supported by tool-sync
, add a TOML table entry and list
all the required fields like in the example below:
[tokei]
owner = "XAMPPRocky" # GitHub username
repo = "tokei" # GitHub repository
exe_name = "tokei" # Executable name inside the asset
# uncomment to download a specific version or tag
# tag = "12.1.1"
# Asset name to download on linux OSes
asset_name.linux = "x86_64-unknown-linux-musl"
# uncomment if you want to install on macOS as well
# asset_name.macos = "apple-darwin"
# uncomment if you want to install on Windows as well
# asset_name.windows = "x86_64-pc-windows-msvc"
ℹ️
tool-sync
searches asset name using the substring search. That's why you don't need to specify the full asset name in the config, only the minimal part required for identifying the asset. However,tool-sync
doesn't guarantee you to find the asset you need if multiple assets from the GitHub release match the substring.
All fields in each tool section are
- required for unknown tools,
- optional for known tools.
This means that you can override only some of the fields for known tools.
This can be helpful if e.g. you want to install a custom version of ripgrep
from a forked repository. To do this, specify only the repository owner in the
config:
[ripgrep]
owner = "me"
Install all the tools specified in ~/.tool.toml
:
tool sync
Install all the tools from config in a different location:
tool --config=path/to/my/config.toml sync
Run tool --help
for more details.
If you hit the limit for downloading assets or want to download assets from private repositories, create a personal access token and export it as the
GITHUB_TOKEN
environment variable.
This section contains tool-sync
comparison to existing alternatives:
-
Manual download. You can download GitHub releases manually without using any extra tools.
- Pros
- No extra tools required, only your browser and unpack utility
- Cons
- Tedious manual process
- Pros
-
GitHub CLI. You can download assets from releases using the GitHub CLI tool
gh
.gh release download --repo chshersh/tool-sync v0.0.0 --pattern='*linux*' tar -xvf tool-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz ./tool --version
- Pros
- Using a more common tool (that you probably have)
- Cons
- Can't download multiple tools with a single command
- Can't guess the asset name by your OS
- Pros
-
dra.
dra
is the closest alternative totool-sync
. It's a CLI tool, written in Rust, that allows downloading individual releases easily.- Pros
- Convenient interface for downloading a single release
- Cons
- Can't download multiple tools with a single command
- Can't guess the asset name by your OS
- Pros
-
home-manager. Home Manager provides a full-features solution for managing a user environment using the Nix package manager.
- Pros
- Supports more than downloading tools from GitHub Releases
- Access to the bigger Nix ecosystem
- Cons
- More complicated solution
- Requires learning and using Nix
- Pros
Check CONTRIBUTING.md for contributing guidelines.
Use cargo
to build the project and run all tests:
cargo build
cargo test
tool-sync
contains a database of common tools and provides easier
support for them. It's possible to add more tools (and you can suggest them!).
The following list contains guidelines for including a new tool. They don't
serve as gatekeeping criteria but more as points system:
- 6 months passed since the tool release
- So that the database won't be populated with fresh tools that are never supported
- At least 3 releases
- To ensure stable naming scheme for assets
- Commonly used tool
tool-sync
strives to be generic so it might not want to support a DNA analysis CLI tool which is useful only for a specific group
- The
tool-sync
author find the tool helpful- In the end, there're people behind
tool-sync
who maintain this project while the rest of the world benefits from it for free. At least,tool-sync
authors decide what they want to use and whether they want to support a tool indefinitely.
- In the end, there're people behind