Better installations

[ghostsquad]

It would be nice if mage was distributed in other ways like brew, apt, apk, yum, chocolatey. This would make installation trivial.

[natefinch]

So, yes, that's a good idea. But...

Mage requires go to be available. Go can download and install mage (and mage has no external dependencies, so you don't even need to worry about dependency management), so it's generally not a big deal for most uses.

Is this just a general "this would be a good idea" request, or is there a problem you're having that needs a better solution? Knowing that can help me prioritize the issue.

[ghostsquad]

The default instructions are kind of ominous from a security or "what did it just do?" standpoint. Honestly, I don't know what bootstrap actually does. Being able to download/install the binary easily without extracting it from a tar would be great. Just thinking of the best way to get up and running quickly, easily and reliably both locally and in a ci/cd environment.

go get -u -d github.com/magefile/mage 
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/magefile/mage
go run bootstrap.go 

[ntrrg]

Did you try https://magefile.org/zeroinstall/? You don't need to download any file in this way and you can manage versions with modules or dep.

If you don't want to type go run mage.go -v test you could create a shell script like:

mage (or any name you want):

#!/bin/sh

exec go run mage.go $@

And just type ./mage -v test. For Travis you could do this:

.travis.yml:

os: linux
dist: xenial
git:
  depth: 1
language: go
go: "1.12.2"
env:
  - GO111MODULE=on
script: ./mage -v test

[ghostsquad]

Good information. I will use this. Thank you

[kostrse]

Now, besides brew (#288), it also available in scoop (#375) for Windows users.

Linux/MacOS

brew install mage

Windows

scoop install mage

[sheldonhull]

The default instructions are kind of ominous from a security or "what did it just do?" standpoint. Honestly, I don't know what bootstrap actually does. Being able to download/install the binary easily without extracting it from a tar would be great. Just thinking of the best way to get up and running quickly, easily and reliably both locally and in a ci/cd environment.

go get -u -d github.com/magefile/mage 
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/magefile/mage
go run bootstrap.go 

FYI, I just run go install github.com/magefile/mage@latest. I know it's not the "supported option", but if I care about opening an issue I can install manually. Having as an go install means all in all my repos I don't worry about bootstraping mage. I just run go run mage.go init and from that point on mage and mage-select are available along with all my standard go tools. It's worked great for me and is my go to as it works the same on Linux, mac, and Windows.