ezinstall

Welcome to ezinstall 🎉

ezinstall is a simple package installer which offers basic features like downloading, checksum verification, tarball extraction and install.sh/uninstall.sh script execution.

Why?

ezinstall offers a simple building block which can be used in more complex workflows like automatic deployments etc.

Often it is much easier to just perform a git clone with subsequent manual installation than to register your package in a central package registry, getting it approved, deploying update keys etc.

ezinstall attempts to make this manual installation a little bit more generic and secure as it allows not only the direct installation of conformant git tags or releases but it also offers builtin checksum verification to ensure that you get the same tarball as expected (see also verifiable urls).

Package format

Each package is a simple gzip-compressed tarball which contains two scripts:

• install.sh to build and install the package
• uninstall.sh to uninstall the package

Verifiable URLs

Packages are referenced by special URL format <tarball url...>#sha256=<hex digest...>, where hex digest... is the hex-encoded SHA2-256 digest of the tarball. This allows the user to pin a specific tarball, which can be useful if you are downloading from an untrusted source.