Forklift

A general purpose pallet (package) manager suitable for multi-language development.

Forklift, like npm or maven, can import and cache pallets from various warehouses. In addition to the forklift standard, the basic implementation is in bash, making it suitable for use with any development tooling or languages. Common use cases include abstracting common code from BASH scripts, and creating user-installable JARs.

For more information about forklift, please read the docs.

Usage

• Install forklift
  • POSIX operating systems: bash <(curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/g2forge/forklift/master/install)
  • Windows operating systems: $env:INSTALL_URL="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/g2forge/forklift/master/install"; (New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile("$env:INSTALL_URL.ps1", "$pwd\install.ps1"); powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass .\install.ps1
• Run a command from a pallet: forklift run <warehouse> <pallet> <version> <command-with-arguments>
• Upgrade forklift: forklift upgrade, will check for a new version of forklift itself and upgrade if appropriate
• Uninstall forklift: forklift uninstall (will also clear out all cached and temporary data)

For more commands, please see the command line help by running forklift --help.

Example 1

To run BATS on tests.bats one might run:

forklift run com.github bats-core/bats-core v1.1.0 bin/bats tests.bats

This will import the bats-core/bats-core pallet from github if it has not already been imported. Then it will run the bin/bats script in that pallet with the aruments tests.bats. Note that version v1.1.0 is the latest release at the time of this writing.

Example 2

To get the OS distribution forklift is running on:

forklift run builtin common current osinfo --distro

This example shows the use of the builtin warehouse which references pallets in in the builtin directory. Note that the only version supported by the builtin warehouse is current denoting whatever version the currently running forklift install is. If you want to run a script from another version of forklift you can do so through the com.github warehouse, of course.

Example 3

To run bulldozer catalog on your project:

 forklift run org.maven com.g2forge.bulldozer:bd-build 0.0.2 catalog <PATH TO PROJECT>

This examples shows the use of the maven warehouse which allows one to reference JARs (and any other maven artifacts) as pallets. For more information about running commands from maven pallets (artifacts), please read the maven jack documentation.

Example 4

To install one or more OS packages:

forklift run builtin common current install <PACKAGES>

This examples shows off one of the internal functions of forklift: the ability to install operating system level packages across operating systems. This is particularly useful on Cygwin where this is no native command-line package installer.

You may be interested in the fl-clicommon pallet which takes advantage of this to install commonly needed command line tools.

Example 5

Forklift can be used to create self-installing pallets (GitHub repositories or Maven JARs for example). The below code (pick one depending on OS) will install forklift and then use it to run any forklift command.

bash <(curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/g2forge/forklift/master/install) <ANY FORKLIFT COMMAND>
$env:INSTALL_URL="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/g2forge/forklift/master/install"; (New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile("$env:INSTALL_URL.ps1", "$pwd\install.ps1"); powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass .\install.ps1 <ANY FORKLIFT COMMAND>

You can replace <ANY FORKLIFT COMMAND> with import <warehouse> <pallet> <version>, and add a post-import script to your pallet. As an example, please see fl-clicommon and winpty. You may also want to read the documentation on how to add forklift scripts to your pallet for GitHub or Maven.

Example 6

To run a command, or return the same results from a cache:

forklift run builtin cache current cache <ANY COMMAND>

This will use the cache script built into forklift to either run your command, or return the same stdout, stderr and exit code. Please see the documentation for more about how cache entries are keyed.

Legal

Copyright Greg Gibeling 2018-2019, licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome on github.com/g2forge/forklift. You may wish to read the developers guide before you start trying to modify things.