Thanks to BinaryBuilder, some programs are now much easier to install as Julia *_jll packages compared to other solutions. However, simple no-setup ways to run these programs were not available yet to my knowledge. This is where RunBinary.jl (registered) comes to help. Its API consists of a single …

Indeed, @ericphanson pointed me to ygg in slack when I asked about it. As I understand, ygg’s approach is aimed at a somewhat different case of using jll binaries: set up all required programs beforehand, add paths to $PATH, etc. RunBinary is the alternative for running these programs in a more ad…

RunBinary.jl happened to be one of those rare packages that don’t need any maintenance for years :slight_smile: It’s one of my first Julia packages and has been working reliably since creation. It also remains compatible with all Julia versions since 1.6. Julia + BinaryBuilder still is one of the e…

RunBinary.jl is now a Julia App The most recent Julia version (1.12) supports so-called “apps”, and now RunBinary.jl can utilize this! Run: import Pkg; Pkg.Apps.add("RunBinary") in Julia 1.12 to install the app, which then should become available from your terminal as: runbinary ImageMagick.conv…

Neat! Is there a way to run a binary from a JLL package installed in some environment (not globally)? Like: runbinary --project=@img ImageMagick.convert input.png output.jpg?

[image] mchitre: not globally runbinary doesn’t use and doesn’t affect the global Julia environment. Everything is installed into a temporary env – the idea is to have everything automatic, no manual setup nor cleanup.

So I suppose that ends up being a key difference with ygg — that’s a more traditional package manager with installation and version management, whereas this is a “just give me the latest version on the fly” sort of thing. In practice, do you find it ends up GC’ing and re-downloading the JLLs often? …

Yes, runbinary definitely aims to make running “anything” as simple as possible, no per-binary installation. Conceptually close to comma in Nix ecosystem. I didn’t systematically measure how often GC/redownloads trigger, but it just reuses the existing Pkg cache policies.

[ANN] RunBinary.jl: easily run binaries from YggDrasil

Package Announcements

oschulz June 19, 2021, 11:44am 2

There’s also ygg (see also Announcing ygg), maybe there’s some synergy potential here?

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[ANN] RunBinary.jl: easily run binaries from YggDrasil

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