Specs

crystal-build

Disclaimer: This is an in-progress-but-working rewrite of crystal-build in Crystal. While largely functional, the existing application is written in Perl and in general it's hard to find maintainers, and people who are willing to work on Perl projects.

crystal-build is a plugin for crenv which provides a crenv install command. This command facilitates downloading and building/installing specific versions of Crystal and Shards.

Currently this project only supports downloading and installing Crystal from a released Crystal binary from the crystal-lang GitHub releases page. Building Crystal from source is a feature that is on the roadmap. Shards, if not included in the GitHub release, will be built and installed from source using the Crystal version that was just installed.

Installation

For a really basic installation, if a binary for your OS is included in the Releases page of this repository, rename the binary to crenv-install, and add that binary to $CRENV_ROOT/plugins/crystal-build/bin/. You won't have the ablility to uninstall Crystal versions with crenv uninstall this way.

To build from scratch, clone the repository and build it with an existing Crystal installation. If you don't have an existing Crystal installation and you use macOS, the easiest way is to install crystal using homebrew. This should typically work.

git clone https://github.com/taylorthurlow/crystal-build-cr.git $CRENV_ROOT/plugins/crystal-build
cd $CRENV_ROOT/plugins/crystal-build
shards install
crystal build --release src/build.cr -o bin/crenv-install

Usage

crenv install [options] <version>
    -h, --help                       Print this help
    -v, --verbose                    Enable verbose output
    --version                        Print the version number
    --shards-version=SHARDS_VERSION  Specify a version of Shards to be installed, if it is not already present
    -l, --list                       Print a list of available Crystal versions

Install a specific version of Crystal with:

crenv install 1.6.0

If you compile from source you should also have access to crenv uninstall <version>. If you just copied the binary and you don't have the uninstall command, you can achieve the same effect by removing the desired directory from $CRENV_ROOT/versions. You can add a simple uninstall script with this command:

echo "rm -r $CRENV_ROOT/versions/$1" > $CRENV_ROOT/plugins/crystal-build/bin/crenv-uninstall