Vulcan

Vulcan helps developers install and maintain CLI tools and packages on their Mac OSX and Linux machines across a variety of package managers (referenced as "installers" here on forth) . It uses a declarative YAML based configuration to define the packages that should be installed, the desired versions of those packages, and the specific installer that should be used to install those packages. This allows you you to manage all your packages from a single location.

Sample configuration file:

installers:
  - name: nvm
  - name: pyenv
  - name: asdf

packages:
  - name: jq
  - name: curl
  - name: awscli
  - name: direnv
  - name: vulcan
    repository: emilhdiaz/tap
    repository-url: https://github.com/emilhdiaz/homebre-tap.git
  - name: helm
    installer: asdf
    version: 3.3.4
  - name: nodejs
    installer: nvm
    version: 14.13.0
  - name: python
    installer: pyenv
    version: 3.8.6
    requires:
      - bzip2
      - sqlite3

Supported config directives:

Directive	Description
.installers	A list of installers that need to be installed on this machine. Vulcan will decide the best way to install these installers. It may use the system's native installer or a custom installation script based on the recommendations of the installer's authors
.installers.name	The name of the installer (currently supported: brew, apt-get, asdf, sdk (sdkman), pipx, nvm, pyenv, tfenv
.packages	A list of packages (tools, libs, programming languages) that need to be installed on this machine
.packages.name	The name of the packages to install
.packages.installer	The installer that should be used to install this packages
.packages.version	The specific version of this package to install and pin. Defaults to latest, which means that this package will always be updated to the latest version available
.packages.requires	A list of required OS packages that need to be pre-installed before this packages is installed. Vulcan will only use the native installer to install these dependencies
.packages.repository	(Homebrew & ASDF Only / Optional) - The custom Homebrew tap or ASDF plugin to use for this package
.packages.repository-url	(Homebrew &ASDF Only / Optional) - The custom Homebrew tap URL or ASDF plugin URL to use for this package

Selecting which installers to use:

Recognizing that the choice of which installer to use is a personal choice (after all, that flexibility is what Vulcan aims to provide!), we do have some recommendations:

• For any CLI tools that you don't need to pin versions down to a particular patch version (i.e. x.y.z), we recommend that you primarily use the native installer (brew | apt-get) if the package is available.
• For programming languages that you need to install and maintain multiple concurrent versions on your machine, we recommend that you use the installer specific to that language:
  • pyenv - For Python
  • nvm - For NodeJS
  • sdk - For Java
• For any other CLI tools or packages that you need a specific patch version, we recommend that you do not use the native installer (brew | apt-get) as it will not allow you to pin this level of specificity for the version. Instead, use an alternate installer that supports your package like asdf, pipx, sdk, or tfenv.
• NOTE: Vulcan exclusively focuses the installation and management of CLI tools. We do not recommend that you use Vulcan to manage application runtime dependencies. Those dependencies should continue to be managed installed through package managers such as pip (requirements.txt), npm (package.json), or maven (pom.xml).

The Vulcan CLI:

Vulcan's main interface is through a CLI tool called vulcan, which will automatically look for a file named vulcan-config.yml in your current directory unless passed the --config option.

Pre-requisites

Currently Vulcan is only supported for the zsh shell and requires a native installer (brew | apt-get) to be pre-installed on the machine.

MacOx

At minimum the Mac OSX environment should have homebrew installed and the following packages pre-installed:

• coreutils
• curl
• yq
• jq

All these dependencies can be found in the Brewfile found in this repo and installed with:

brew bundle

Debian Linux

At minimum the Debian environment should have apt-get and the following packages pre-installed:

• coreutils
• curl
• yq
• jq

Installation

Vulcan can be installed

Via brew:

brew tap emilhdiaz/tap
brew install vulcan

Via apt-get:

brew tap emilhdiaz/tap
brew install vulcan

Manually (replace <DIR> below with the directory you'd like to clone the repository into):

# Step 1 - Clone this repository
git clone https://github.com/emilhdiaz/vulcan.git <DIR>

# Step 2 - OS X install pre-requisites
brew bundle

# Step 2 - Debian install pre-requisites
apt-get install -y coreutils curl yq jq

# Step 3 - Add to .bashrc / .zshrc / .profile
export PATH="<DIR>/vulcan/bin:${PATH}"

A base image for Docker also exists:

FROM emilhdiaz/vulcan

Usage

Usage: vulcan ACTION [OPTIONS]

ACTIONS:
  install                       Installs all installers and packages as specified in the supplied vulcan configuration file
  help                          Prints this usage menu


Global OPTIONS:
  --config                      Path to the configuration file (default: vulcan-config.yml)
  --log-level                   The log level (default INFO)
  --dry-run                     Flag to indicate that the install is just a dry-run

Contributions

Community contributions are welcome. Please raise a Github Issue to capture the changes you'd like to see applied to the tool and submit Pull Requests that reference that Issue.

License

MIT