Suggestion: Installing from npm

[RecuencoJones]

We are using gomplate quite frequently for many purposes and sometimes for node/npm projects.

Not sure if you know https://www.npmjs.com/package/go-npm but is a really nice tool that allows JS devs to easily install go binary packages as npm modules (either for a project or globally).

Its current status does not allow downloading untarred files – although I'm working on that (sanathkr/go-npm#8).

Do you think it would be possible to publish this/do you want to host this in your GitHub account?

I created a small proof of concept if you want to check it:

npm i -g RecuencoJones/gomplate-npm
gomplate version

[hairyhenderson]

Hi @RecuencoJones - thanks for taking the time to log this! This is an intriguing concept! I think this could make sense as yet another alternative for installing gomplate.

Is there a reason that your PR is necessary? gomplate is distributed as a binary, not a tar archive.

[RecuencoJones]

Yes! The PR is absolutely necessary to allow go-npm to download binaries without compression, currently it only supports downloading .tar.gz resources.

[hairyhenderson]

ahh - I misunderstood! Thanks 😉

I'll think about the best place for this.

[RecuencoJones]

Let me know when you come up to a decision!

Meanwhile I've created some automation scripts for publishing previous releases of gomplate to npm too in https://github.com/RecuencoJones/gomplate-npm/tree/feature/release-existing-versions

[hairyhenderson]

Cool! I hope to get this dealt with this weekend ($DAYJOB has been getting in the way 😂) - my thought is to put it in https://github.com/gomplate/gomplate-npm/ (as yet uncreated!)

[hairyhenderson]

@RecuencoJones ok! I've copied your release-existing-versions branch over to https://github.com/gomplate/gomplate-npm - I've invited you to be a Collaborator for that repo, so you can keep working on it if you want.

I'll get a release pushed to https://www.npmjs.com/package/gomplate soon!

[hairyhenderson]

Ok, https://www.npmjs.com/package/gomplate is published, and it seems to work as expected:

$ npm i gomplate

> gomplate@3.3.1 postinstall /Users/hairyhenderson/tmp/node_modules/gomplate
> go-npm install

Downloading from URL: https://github.com/hairyhenderson/gomplate/releases/download/v3.3.1/gomplate_darwin-amd64-slim
Placed binary on /Users/hairyhenderson/tmp/node_modules/gomplate/node_modules/.bin/gomplate
npm notice created a lockfile as package-lock.json. You should commit this file.
npm WARN tmp@1.0.0 No description
npm WARN tmp@1.0.0 No repository field.

+ gomplate@3.3.1
added 68 packages from 62 contributors and audited 91 packages in 17.524s
found 0 vulnerabilities
$ ls -alh ./node_modules/gomplate/node_modules/.bin/gomplate 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 hairyhenderson 5.7M Mar 24 14:12 ./node_modules/gomplate/node_modules/.bin/gomplate
$ ./node_modules/gomplate/node_modules/.bin/gomplate --version
gomplate version 3.3.1
$ du -sh node_modules 
13M     node_modules

I gotta say, installing 68 packages and 13MBs just to get a single 5.7MB binary seems a bit overkill... But that's one of the reasons I switched from Node.js to Go years ago 😉

Anyway, it works!

[RecuencoJones]

Thank you very much! 😄