How-to guide

Install aless

Install aless on Linux, macOS or Windows, from a release, with Homebrew or with Cargo, and check what you downloaded.

aless is one binary with nothing else to install beside it. Every release is on GitHub Releases, built for Linux, macOS and Windows, each on x86_64 and on aarch64.

With the installer #

On Linux or macOS:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/rjrodger/aless/releases/latest/download/aless-installer.sh | sh

On Windows, in PowerShell:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -c "irm https://github.com/rjrodger/aless/releases/latest/download/aless-installer.ps1 | iex"

Both put aless in the bin directory of CARGO_HOME, which is ~/.cargo/bin unless you have set it, where cargo install would put it. Neither installs anything that updates aless later. On Linux the shell installer picks the build for your C library, or the static build, which runs anywhere.

With Homebrew #

On macOS or Linux:

brew install rjrodger/tap/aless

The formula installs the man page and the completions for bash, zsh, fish and PowerShell as well. Set up completions and the man page says what your shell needs to read them.

With Cargo #

With a Rust toolchain, version 1.88 or newer:

cargo install --locked aless

--locked builds with the dependency versions aless was tested with. cargo binstall aless fetches the prebuilt binary instead of compiling it.

To build the newest commit rather than a release:

cargo install --locked --git https://github.com/rjrodger/aless aless

Check what you downloaded #

Each archive on a release has a .sha256 file beside it, and a build provenance attestation, which the GitHub CLI checks. For the x86_64 Linux build:

sha256sum -c aless-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz.sha256
gh attestation verify aless-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz --repo rjrodger/aless

An archive holds the binary, the man page and the completions, with the licence and the changelog.

Check that it runs #

Ask for its version:

$ aless --version
aless 0.1.1

The tutorials start from here.