# Gird

Gird is a command-line tool for downloading release
artifacts. Currently, it supports downloading from GitHub and GitLab
releases, and there’s room to expand it to other, similar sources.

## Example: Downloading from GitHub

Given an artifact name, user name, and repository name, Gird will
locate the most recent release for that repository, find a release
artifact with a matching file name, and download it.

For example, to download the current [rqlite](https://rqlite.io/)
release for linux on amd64, we can do the following:

```
$ gird linux-amd64 -e musl github rqlite rqlite
```

In that example, `linux-amd64` is telling gird that we want a release
file which contains “linux-amd64” in its file name, `-e musl` is
telling it that we *don’t* want the variant that has
“linux-amd64-musl“ in its file name even though it would otherwise
match, `github` is telling it that it should source the file from a
GitHub release, the first `rqlite` is telling it to look under the
GitHub user called “rqlite” and the second `rqlite` is telling it that
we want that user’s repository which is also called “rqlite”.

Gird will look through the current GitHub release for the specified
repository, find a matching file
(e.g. **rqlite-v8.23.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz**), and download it.

## It’s also a library

Gird can also be added to your Cargo.toml and used programmatically in
other Rust programs. Each source for downloading release artifacts has
its own module within the crate, containing specialized tools for
interacting with that source.

## Community

Gird lives at <https://git.highenergymagic.org/gird>. If you encounter a
bug, would like to discuss Gird, or need help, email me at
djarb@highenergymagic.org.

Patches are welcome by email as well. Prepare them with **git
format-patch** and send them to the same address, or point me at a
repository I can pull from.

## A Note on Static Linking

It can be convenient to statically link programs such as Gird which
may be used in bootstrapping a working environment. Rust programs are
*mostly* static by default, but on x86-64 Linux we can go fully static
by adding an alias to the .cargo/config.toml file

    [alias]
    static = ["build", "--release", "--target", "x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu", "--config", "build.rustflags='-C target-feature=+crt-static'"]

which will enable us to compile statically linked release binaries
with a simple

    cargo static

The same trick works, with appropriate modification of the target
identifier, on other CPU architectures and on Windows MSVC targets.