Simplify installation experience for Notation CLI

[FeynmanZhou]

Notation CLI only has binary for installation. This is convenient for a few Linux distros but it is cumbersome to install on Win, macOS, and other Linux distros. There are some existing requests as follows:

notaryproject/notation#204
notaryproject/notation#431

To simplify the installation experience, we need to consider providing a native installation package on each platform/OS so that users can install Notation CLI as simply as possible. Here are the popular installation methods for consideration:

macOS

• Homebrew

Windows

• Winget
• Chocolaty (low priority)

Linux / Unix

• Offline installation package: Deb and RPM
• Debian: apt (need investigation)
• Arch: pacman (need investigation)
• Alpine: apk (need investigation)
• Homebrew

Container image (e.g. docker run)

It relies on a container engine like Docker.

[yizha1]

Update the milestone to rc-3 based on the discussion.

[kokamkarsahil]

Hello, I am interested in working on this issue.

I was thinking of an installation script which will cover all Linux distros and macOS based on its architecture, which will download a compactible release from GitHub releases and setup it. And a browser based platform detection to switch to a prompt suggesting to download .exe instead or running the script.

This will reduce the task of maintaining packages for all the different Linux distros.

Similar to rustup[0]

0. https://rustup.rs

Thank You!

[FeynmanZhou]

@kokamkarsahil Developing a generic installation script to cover all Linux distros and macOS sounds good to me. I am thinking if we could provide a script and enable users to install Notation CLI with this command:

curl -L https://notaryproject.dev/download | NOTATION_VERSION=v1.0.0 TARGET_ARCH=x86_64 sh -

For macOS, having a Homebrew formula might be better.

[kokamkarsahil]

Thanks for the reply @FeynmanZhou!

@kokamkarsahil Developing a generic installation script to cover all Linux distros and macOS sounds good to me. I am thinking if we could provide a script and enable users to install Notation CLI with this command:

curl -L https://notaryproject.dev/download | NOTATION_VERSION=v1.0.0 TARGET_ARCH=x86_64 sh -

We can also make script to auto detect Architecture and OS.

By checking $OSTYPE[0] and uname -m[1] from the client.

I have create a demo script to show that:
https://gist.github.com/kokamkarsahil/bc1ac4938f113fb4246613e4e9bf5501

Moreover we can also point it towards main domain and do user-agent[2] check to send the install script.

curl -L https://notaryproject.dev

Script in action

Updated to gif

Please don't try the script in non-sandbox environment as it is not well tested in all platforms

Thank You!

---

Update: Added reference

0. https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-Variables.html#index-OSTYPE
1. https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/uname.1.html
2. https://everything.curl.dev/http/requests/user-agent

[FeynmanZhou]

@kokamkarsahil Thanks for providing the demo. I will test it on my machines. We will discuss and triage this issue in the next Notary community meeting.