Offer curl-based, pre-compiled, zig-less installation

[mcandre]

Yay, a Zig version manager!

Could we get some shell install commands, to help first-time users who may not already have a Zig compiler installed? Similar to how rustup works.

Specifically, the user should not be required to have zig installed at the time zigup is installed. Rather, zigup could obtain a precompiled zig binary and put it in a zigup-friendly place on behalf of the user, so that the user only needs to know how to run a curl command, and zigup does 100% of the rest of the work of preparing zig's. Most version managers work this way.

[marler8997]

Yeah I think some equivalent to rustup would be great.

I'm a bit confused by your wording here though. Zigup doesn't require Zig to be installed to work. If you have a zigup binary, you should be able to use it whether or not zig is installed. That being said, in order to compile zigup you need a Zig compiler, is that what you meant?

[Nomy1]

Yes, I think he means that having a binary to download directly from here would be very helpful for new users as they wouldn't even have a zig compiler installed yet.

New users could just download a precompiled zigup binary and go

[marler8997]

Ok, I think the tentative plan then is to write a script/tool to compile zigup for the same set of platforms that Zig supports, then creates a set of archives that can be uploaded into a zigup release on github. These versions of zigup should be compiled statically (like the zig executable) for portability. These archives could be downloaded manually, however, we can also host a shell script that can be piped to curl that will select and download the appropriate zigup archive and extract it for the user.

Note that to support a static version of zigup, we'll need to either compile openssl statically, or use a complete zig implementation for HTTPS. I discovered this project the other day, we may be able to use it: https://github.com/alexnask/iguanaTLS

[truemedian]

I have written a library that does just this. It is truemedian/zfetch.

It only requires:

• MasterQ32/zig-network, to provide a system-agnostic socket layer
• MasterQ32/zig-uri, for uri parsing
• truemedian/hzzp my http parser
• and alexnask/iguanaTLS for doing https

So we're fairly close to this goal.

[devins2518]

Ok, I think the tentative plan then is to write a script/tool to compile zigup for the same set of platforms that Zig supports, then creates a set of archives that can be uploaded into a zigup release on github.

Would setting up CI to build and upload artifacts for the short term be a possibility?

[marler8997]

Would setting up CI to build and upload artifacts for the short term be a possibility?

Yes

[devins2518]

Working on it rn :+1: