Wondering what's the least effort I should put into making it easy to install #Scala applications built with scala-cli. As a user, would you 1. Download it from GitHub and build it yourself 2. download a pre-built thing from GitHub releases page 3. install from homebrew - ThreadSky

alterationx10.com • 77 days ago

Wondering what's the least effort I should put into making it easy to install #Scala applications built with scala-cli. As a user, would you 1. Download it from GitHub and build it yourself 2. download a pre-built thing from GitHub releases page 3. install from homebrew

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makingthematrix.github.io•77 days ago

What is the UI? JavaFX? Just a REPL? Maybe you could build a GraalVM Native Image for each platform... but then it would put a lot of burden on you.

alterationx10.com•77 days ago

In this context, probably cli apps with no gui. I’ll be deploying things with gui as web apps, and libraries via central. I don’t imagine I’ll have many users anytime soon (or ever 😁), but I believe in lowering the barrier to entry. That’s why I’m leaning to prebuilt apps on GitHub releases.

makingthematrix.github.io•77 days ago

Yes. Sounds reasonable :)

michal.pawlik.dev•77 days ago

There's also `courier launch` where you can provide the package name https://get-coursier.io/docs/cli-launch

alterationx10.com•77 days ago

I was thinking this could be a good option as well, but I think that still requires publishing an artifact to central / some repository - which I don’t want to do for an app (but that’s just me, haha). Also, making sure users have/use coursier is one more hoop to jump through 🤔

michal.pawlik.dev•77 days ago

That's true. You need to set up publishing, and users need to have courier installed.
If your target user is not a scala developer, I'd go with `scala-cli run`. Bonus points for making some users see the code that way 😁

michal.pawlik.dev•77 days ago

That said, some projects like scalafix distribute their CLI apps via coursier https://scalacenter.github.io/scalafix/docs/users/installation.html#command-line

alterationx10.com•76 days ago

I mean, it makes plenty of sense, given how everything else is distributed in the ecosystem. Maybe I feel like my small apps aren't worthy of the eternity of maven central 😆

alterationx10.com•76 days ago

😁 I'm going all-in on scala-cli , but even I don't want to pass args through `scala-cli run` all the time. I think the default `scala-cli package` command will even download a JVM, but I could be remembering that wrong - perhaps it will download the appropriate JVM assuming one is already installed.

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