Eget: easy pre-built binary installation

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.

Eget Demo

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 for a clear set of rules to make your software compatible with Eget.

For more in-depth documentation, see DOCS.md.

Examples

eget zyedidia/micro --tag nightly
eget jgm/pandoc --to /usr/local/bin
eget junegunn/fzf
eget neovim/neovim
eget ogham/exa --asset ^musl
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

How to get Eget

Before you can get anything, you have to get Eget. If you already have Eget and want to upgrade, use eget zyedidia/eget.

Quick-install script

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.

Homebrew

brew install eget

Chocolatey

choco install eget

Pre-built binaries

Pre-built binaries are available on the releases page.

From source

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.

Usage

The TARGET 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 an environment variable named either GITHUB_TOKEN or EGET_GITHUB_TOKEN when running Eget. If both are set, EGET_GITHUB_TOKEN will take precedence. Eget will read this variable and send the token as authorization with requests to GitHub. It is also possible to read the token from a file by using @/path/to/file as the token value.

Usage:
  eget [OPTIONS] TARGET

Application Options:
  -t, --tag=           tagged release to use instead of latest
      --pre-release    include pre-releases when fetching the latest version
      --source         download the source code for the target repo instead of a release
      --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
  -d, --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; use ^ for anti-match
      --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
  -r, --remove         remove the given file from $EGET_BIN or the current directory
  -v, --version        show version information
  -h, --help           show this help message
  -D, --download-all   download all projects defined in the config file
  -k, --disable-ssl    disable SSL verification for download

Configuration

Eget can be configured using a TOML file located at ~/.eget.toml or it will fallback to the expected XDG_CONFIG_HOME directory of your os. Alternatively, the configuration file can be located in the same directory as the Eget binary or the path specified with the environment variable EGET_CONFIG.

Both global settings can be configured, as well as setting on a per-repository basis.

Sections can be named either global or "owner/repo", where owner and repo are the owner and repository name of the target repository (not that the owner/repo format is quoted).

For example, the following configuration file will set the --to flag to ~/bin for all repositories, and will set the --to flag to ~/.local/bin for the zyedidia/micro repository.

[global]
target = "~/bin"

["zyedidia/micro"]
target = "~/.local/bin"

Available settings - global section

| Setting | Related Flag | Description | Default | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | github_token | N/A | GitHub API token to use for requests | "" | | all | --all | Whether to extract all candidate files. | false | | download_only | --download-only | Whether to stop after downloading the asset (no extraction). | false | | download_source | --source | Whether to download the source code for the target repo instead of a release. | false | | file | --file | The glob to select files for extraction. | * | | quiet | --quiet | Whether to only print essential output. | false | | show_hash | --sha256 | Whether to show the SHA-256 hash of the downloaded asset. | false | | system | --system | The target system to download for. | all | | target | --to | The directory to move the downloaded file to after extraction. | . | | upgrade_only | --upgrade-only | Whether to only download if release is more recent than current version. | false |

Available settings - repository sections

| Setting | Related Flag | Description | Default | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | all | --all | Whether to extract all candidate files. | false | | asset_filters | --asset | An array of partial asset names to filter the available assets for download. | [] | | download_only | --download-only | Whether to stop after downloading the asset (no extraction). | false | | download_source | --source | Whether to download the source code for the target repo instead of a release. | false | | file | --file | The glob to select files for extraction. | * | | quiet | --quiet | Whether to only print essential output. | false | | show_hash | --sha256 | Whether to show the SHA-256 hash of the downloaded asset. | false | | system | --system | The target system to download for. | all | | target | --to | The directory to move the downloaded file to after extraction. | . | | upgrade_only | --upgrade-only | Whether to only download if release is more recent than current version. | false | | verify_sha256 | --verify-sha256 | Verify the sha256 hash of the asset against a provided hash. | "" |

Example configuration

[global]
    github_token = "ghp_1234567890"
    quiet = false
    show_hash = false
    upgrade_only = true
    target = "./test"

["zyedidia/micro"]
    upgrade_only = false
    show_hash = true
    asset_filters = [ "static", ".tar.gz" ]
    target = "~/.local/bin/micro"

By using the configuration above, you could run the following command to download the latest release of micro:

Eget

Install / Use

README