I am genuinely curious what it tells you, as "curl https//.. | sh" has long been an enormously popular approach to distribution in the open source world. Homebrew, to name just one example, advertises a similar method.
(pi.sh also documents other install methods, like `npm`, on their homepage)
If trust and security is the issue, unfortunately "better" ideas like hashpipe [1] never achieved critical mass
> I am genuinely curious what it tells you, as "curl https//.. | sh" has long been an enormously popular approach to distribution in the open source world.
It's plain horrible. You could have, for example, a compromised server serving malware but only one out of every 100 download. The only signature you rely on is TLS.
Proper package distribution are using proper signatures schemes, are decentralized, even for some offer reproducible builds (meaning you can rebuild the whole package yourself and verify your build matches), etc.
Hashpipe is an attempt at reproducing some of those guarantees. Not unlike container pining using hashes. It at least fixes the "Jack and John installed this already and I know I'm getting the same version as they did".
Proper software distribution is signed, reproducible and ideally also uses some proof-of-existence for the hashes.
My bet is this: in the face of the countless supply chain attacks, we'll see more and more people getting very serious about security, including the security of software distribution. And curl bash'ing won't be part of it.
Package managers: ecosystem is fragmented, requiring a long list of distro- and package-manager-specific instructions. Many scripts already install through package managers, they simply make the user’s life easier.
Flatpaks: These are clearly designed for desktop applications, with CLIs treated as an afterthought. They may be the best long-term hope, but today they are definitely not as convenient or widely available as a simple script.
If you care about adoption, `curl | sh` is the only real option today, which is why virtually all project show it as the first option.
The "like an adult" is what has and will continue to hold back linux on the desktop. Always gatekeeping less technical users instead of acknowledging adoption and ease of use are critical.
A lot of those scripts are wrappers around package managers. Creating them is extra work for distributors, but they still do it because package-manager installs are not truly one-liners and offer far less control over the installation experience.
Users need to figure out which of the 10+ package managers they should be using, then run several commands. If something fails, the error messages are often cryptic and not easily configurable by the distributor.
And that’s before getting into the many rough edges of package managers. Most of them flat-out refuse to handle configuration and leave that part to the end user. Now you also need to document how to edit YAML and restart a systemd service. With an install script this is also solved.
For power users, this always looks trivial. In practice it raises the barrier to entry and can meaningfully affect adoption if your product is often used by less technical people.
In what world does a user have to choose between 10 package managers? Each distro has exactly one. There are also only about three, maybe four main package managers out there.
A shell script being piped into bash has so many more ways to break than a package. And if yhe theory is that package managers are fickle (they aren't), then how does adding more complexity help?
It is much simpler, much safer, and easier to maintain a package than an install.sh, eapecially for a big project.
Configuration can be handled by a script, yes. Here's a crazy idea: Your package can include scripts for configuring the software. It's almost as if most packages do. The scripts/utilities could even restart a systemd service for you.
Unless you're talking about configuring your build, in which case we're dealing with an experienced developer who will have no trouble just cloning the repo and building from source.
My biggest issue is: if we're dealing with someone who can't use a package manager, we're dealing with someone who doesn't have the capacity to judge how safe a script downloaded off the internet is. This does not drive linux adoption, it drives botnet adoption.
It's crazy to me that even after seeing so many major software distributors choose `curl | sh` as their entry point, people like you will still argue to the ends of the earth that there’s no problem with the package manager ecosystem.
I'll stop there. I'm not interested in continuing this discussion when it's being conducted in bad faith.
Bad faith, or perhaps just ignorance. It reminds me of purist junior engineers - and I have been one - refusing to understand or tradeoff in the world beyond their own.
Rather than argue with those of us who are pointing out messy realities, this commenter might be better served filing a bug against any number of the projects that offer installation this way, asking them to remove it, and see if it lands any better.
Technical purity/superiority isn’t the only factor, or even the most important one, driving projects to offer quick installers like this.
I would appreciate it if you would respond to me directly rather than suggest vaguely that I'm inexperienced and don't understand the realities of software distribution.
I would also appreciate it if you actually talk about something concrete rather than simply claiming to be right. You shouldn't pipe stuff from the internet into your shell.
Are you claiming that's about some highfallutin "technical purity"? Is it technical purity to check inside the bag when you buy a pig in a poke? No, that's common sense. It's common sense to have some degree of knowledge about what programs you execute on your computer. As root, at that.
Sure: I think you're essentially missing a whole set of concerns - ones that are not purely technical - behind why this method is popular; and so your arguments wouldn't convince someone actually responsible for one of these scripts to change or cease the practice.
Nobody would argue that it's categorically safe/good/smart to blindly pipe a script into your shell; and for the record, I agree. I would also readily agree that habituating users to doing this probably creates new, more general risks especially among how less-technical users interact with their CLI.
However, the realities of the "real world" make it popular for a reason, in light of those negatives; tons of scaled projects continue to offer a 1-liner. So we have to ask, why? They'd probably say that's because it (a) improves project adoption, and (b) reduces "install broken" tickets.
You have to address the non-technical merits and goals to get behavior to change here, and sadly, I don't think anyone has done that.
But who cares about me? I'm not currently maintaining one of these (though I did once). My suggestion to bring your argument to an active project was genuine: try it! I'd be delighted to see you bring about the change you want.
[PS: The commenter I replied to originally used the term "bad faith", which they've since edited]
The fact that people do something doesn't make it good.
I am arguing in good faith about the merits of the approaches. I am engaging with the points of argument being brought up from the opposing side of the argument (see above). I am not veering off on side-tracks, unlike you, for example.
There' a simple good faith argument (that I have been making) which you can try responding to: Running arbitrary code from the internet without checking is bad. There is some effort needed to package software, but that is not that much effort in the grand scheme.
Most official repositories have policies that are incompatible with the needs of software vendors (release timing, supported versions, bundled dependencies, etc...).
IMO a lot of the blame falls onto the package manager ecosystem refusing to take into account very valid needs and claiming they aren't real / desirable.
i dunno, nothing about most computing is particularly easy to use or intuitive.
what has worked over time is having computers of various types in schools, where teachers teach students and let them play with it.
nobody teaches about the command line, so nobody knows what to do with it. its also inscrutible without a useable help view, unless you already know how to use the terminal
Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android are definitely much easier to use and more intuitive than Linux today. That’s because their developers are incentivized to put themselves in the shoes of less-skilled users and figure out how to build a good experience for them.
I’m all for higher Linux adoption on desktop, but there’s still a lot of resistance to making less-skilled users the primary target instead of power users.
Teaching can help, but if it takes 50 hours to learn the basics of Linux versus 5 hours for Windows, it’s a losing battle.
The ideas aren't mutually exclusive, and I've never seen an open source project support "curl | sh" without also supporting those methods.
Indeed, plenty of these scripts often act as a "what OS and packager do we have" mux. Just look at the source of this one, for example.
When you support an open source project at scale and/or with less savvy users, you come to see the benefit of "here, just f'ing slam this into your shell and we'll figure it out" installers. I know I have.
There are many ways of implementing a curl | sh installer, some of them robust, some of them not.
However they all look the same to the end user.
That's a feature and also a potential source of problems since users cannot tell if that particular application they want to install Is implementing the installer correctly or not. The outcome is that most users just trust that application (possibly because it's popular and trusted) and that's fine but it also trains the public that this installation method is ok and that gives a positive feedback for other applications to also offer their software using that installer pattern until at least one of such packages is implemented very badly or sneakily malicious.
If only a curl had a flag where you pass the sha256 of the file and it first checks it against the buffered file before outputting it to stdout.
That would singlehandedly resolve this whole kerfuffle.
The install instructions will be a slightly longer one liner and that's fine because people copy paste it anyway
I really hate the `curl <url> | sh` specifically because if your connection drops at a specifically unlucky point in time you are left with a partially executed script which if you are unlucky enough may just have been executing `rm -r ~/.cache/<pkg>/download` but it stopped at `rm-r ~/`.
Is it likely? No. Can it happen? Yea.
Just make it `curl -o <file> <url> && sh <file>` and this entire problem is gone.
Correct, and/or in addition, most nowadays prepend something like `set -euo pipefail` to the scripts in the line immediately after the shebang which results in stopping on errors, including things such as syntax errors stemming from e.g. incomplete installer transmission over wire.
(At least for bash scripts, I’m not sure whether these are POSIX syntax to be frank.)
There is no threat model that doesn't also apply to pretty much every other distribution method.
It's just people who have internalized "don't paste commands from the Internet into your terminal" and aren't thinking about exactly what makes pasting commands from the Internet into your terminal dangerous, and how that applies to this specific case.
it tells you they're just like basically every other CLI targeting project for the last 15 years? I mean is it a big security hole we all accept, yes, it is. But it's not really indicative of much. That's also how I install rust.
Further - what the flicking fuck do you think an installer is going to do on your system? Not run any commands? Because I've written installers for every platform... they ALL can run commands.
So what exactly is the complaint in this comment? If you want to go read the install script - knock yourself out (or hell, point your agent at it...).
I personally try and use my operating systems package manager for all applications (in this instance, dnf on Fedora). The moment you start adding a million repos, third party package managers, Flatpaks, Snaps, random curl install scripts, etc, it becomes extremely unmaintainable.
What happens if the curl application depends on openssl, maybe with a legacy or specific cryptographic function? I assume the curl script will either install the required version, or include the relevant libraries right? Now that is outside of the system package managers scope, meaning updating openSSL to avoid some vuln now requires extra work.
What happens when you go from Fedora 44 to 45? You should be checking all your applications are supported on whatever version or operating system you are running. There is a decently high chance you run into dependency issues when some lib version is updated.
Package Managers are (generally) more secure and simple to use for an end user (they are using the OS to begin with).
Curl scrips are easier for the software developers.
Understand that 99% are comfortable trusting downloads. They know that it's just as easy to sneak backdoors into source code as it is to sneak backdoors into executables.
99% of developers are most definitely not comfortable piping a script into the shell.
I would never runa script without reviewing it. I would install a package from a distros repository without reviewing the contents, however, because I can trust that a distro maintainer has reviewed it, that anyone else in the community can review it, and that that the bytes I'm downloading are the specific bytes I'm supposed to be downloading.
If you run a script off the open internet, you're being massively irresponsible. There are so many attack vectors that could be used here, and they are much easier to implement than something like the massive social engineering attack that was XZ.
