gah is an GitHub Releases app installer, that DOES NOT REQUIRE SUDO! It is a simple bash script that downloads the latest release of an app from GitHub and installs it in ~/.local/bin. It is designed to be used with apps that are distributed as a single binary file.

Motivation

Nowadays more and more command-line tools and applications are distributed via GitHub Releases. The installation process looks always the same: you go to the release page, expand assets, find the right file for your platform (which may be very frustrating, especially when there are 200+ assets and very often developers use different naming conventions - e.g. myapp-linux-amd64, myapp_linux_x64, myapp-unknown-linux-gnu-x86_64, etc.), download it, unpack it, move it to ~/.local/bin, execute chmod +x on it and don't forget to clean up afterwards. For me, it was a hassle. Each time I needed to go thru the process again I was doing "gah! not again!". So I thought, why not automate this process? In fact, I love automation and RegExp. And so gah was born.

Features

• 🏷 Downloads the latest or given release of an app from GitHub

• 🎯 Automatically selects matching binary for the current platform

  • Supported OS: Linux and MacOS
  • Supported architectures: x64 and ARM64

• 🎳 Supports multiple matching apps in a single GitHub Release

• 📤 Supports archived (.zip, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.xz) and single binary releases

• 🗃 Has own base of predefined aliases for GitHub repositories (PRs are welcome!)

• 🔐 Verifies downloaded files using provided by openssl against asset's digest value

Installation

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/marverix/gah/refs/heads/master/tools/install.sh)"

Usage

Type gah help to see the list of available commands.

gah
  install <github_owner/github_repo_name | known_alias> [--tag=<git_tag>] [--use-default-names]
  aliases <show | refresh>
  help
  version

Using known aliases

gah has a predefined set of aliases for some popular apps. You can use these aliases to install the apps without specifying the full GitHub repository name. To see the list of available aliases, type gah aliases show.

The file db.json with aliases is located in db branch. Feel free to add your own aliases or suggest new ones by creating a pull request.

The file is cached locally for 24h.

Specifying the tag

You can specify the tag of the release you want to install. If you don't specify a tag, the latest release will be installed.

gah install getsops/sops --tag=v3.10.2

Unattended mode

gah will try to detect if your terminal supports input or not. To force this behavior you can either use the --unattended flag or set env var UNATTENDED=true. This will skip the confirmation prompt and install the app without asking for any input.

gah install getsops/sops --unattended

or

export UNATTENDED=true
gah install getsops/sops

Update gah

gah update

Examples

Install latest version of gh (GitHub CLI)

gah install gh

Install specific version of argocd

gah install argocd --tag=v2.0.3

Install an app that is not in the predefined aliases

gah install hashicorp/vagrant

Configuration

Here is the list of supported environment variables:

Name	Description	Default
GAH_INSTALL_DIR	The directory where the gah will install your applications. This directory must be in your PATH environment variable.	~/.local/bin, for superuser it will be /usr/local/bin
GAH_CACHE_DIR	The directory where cache will be stored.	~/.cache/gah

Using in GitHub Actions

There is an official GitHub Action to setup gah.

Contributors

Thanks to all contributors:

Roman Verenich 🔣

License

gah is licensed under the Apache-2.0 License. See LICENSE for the full license text.