Distillery

Overview

Without a doubt, homebrew has had a major impact on the macOS and even the linux ecosystem. It has made it easy to install software and keep it up to date. However, it has been around for 15+ years and while it has evolved over time, its core technology really hasn't changed, and 15+ years is an eternity in the tech world. Languages like Go and Rust have made it easy to compile binaries and distribute them without complicated installers or dependencies. I love homebrew, but I think there's room for another tool.

distillery is a tool that is designed to make it easy to install binaries on your system from multiple different sources. It is designed to be straightforward and simple to use. It is NOT designed to be a package manager or handle complex dependencies, that's where homebrew shines.

The goal of this project is to install binaries by leveraging the collective power of all the developers out there. It is now 2026 and more and more developers are using tools like goreleaser and cargo-dist and many others to pre-compile their software and put their binaries up on GitHub, GitLab, or Codeberg. Tools like goreleaser are expanding to support other languages as well.

Let's take advantage of that and make it easy to install those binaries on your system.

Documentation

Full Documentation

Features

• Simple to install binaries on your system from multiple sources
• No reliance on a centralized repository of metadata like package managers
• Support for multiple platforms and architectures
• Support private repositories (this was a feature removed from homebrew)
• Support checksum verifications (if they exist)
• Support signature verifications (if they exist)
• Configurable aliases for shorthand binary names

Quickstart

See full documentation at Installation

Note: the installation script DO NOT CURRENTLY try to modify your path, you will need to do that manually.

MacOS/Linux

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://get.dist.sh | sh

OR with wget

wget --https-only --secure-protocol=TLSv1_2 -qO- https://get.dist.sh | sh

Windows

iwr https://get.dist.sh/install.ps1 -useb | iex

Adjust Your Path

MacOS/Linux

export PATH=$HOME/.distillery/bin:$PATH

Windows

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("Path", "C:\Users\<username>\.distillery\bin;" + $env:Path, [EnvironmentVariableTarget]::User)

Behaviors

• Allow for multiple versions of a binary using tool@version syntax
• Running installation for any version will automatically update the default symlink to that version (i.e. switching versions)
• Caching of HTTP calls where possible (GitHub primarily)
• Caching of downloads

Running install always updates default symlink

Note: this might change before exiting beta.

Whenever you run install the default symlink will always be updated to whatever version you specify. This is to make it easy to switch versions.

Multiple Versions

Every time you run install it will by default seek out the latest version, it will not remove any other versions. All versions are symlinked with the suffix @version this means you can have multiple versions installed at the same time.

It also means you can call any version any time using the @version syntax or if you are using something like direnv you can set aliases in your .envrc file for specific versions.

Example

alias terraform="terraform@1.8.5"

Examples

Install a specific version of a tool using @version syntax. github is the default scope, this implies github/ekristen/aws-nuke

dist install ekristen/aws-nuke@3.16.0

Install a tool from a specific owner and repository, in this case hashicorp. This will install the latest version. However, because hashicorp hosts their binaries on their own domain, distillery has special handling for obtaining the latest version from releases.hashicorp.com instead of GitHub.

dist install hashicorp/terraform

Install a binary from GitLab.

dist install gitlab/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner

Install a binary from Codeberg.

dist install codeberg/forgejo-contrib/forgejo-cli

Usually installing from GitHub, GitLab, or Codeberg is enough, but if you are on a macOS system and Homebrew has the binary you want, you can install it using the homebrew scope. I would generally still recommend just installing from GitHub or GitLab directly if it is available, but this is a nice fallback.

dist install homebrew/opentofu

Commands

• dist install - Install binaries from sources (see examples above)
• dist uninstall - Remove installed binaries (dry-run by default, use --no-dry-run to execute)
• dist list - List all installed binaries and their versions
• dist info - Display system info, config paths, and cache locations
• dist run - Execute a Distfile (batch installation file, similar to a Brewfile)
• dist proof - Generate a Distfile from your currently installed binaries
• dist clean - Clean up orphaned symlinks (dry-run by default, use --no-dry-run to execute)

Supported Sources

• GitHub
• GitLab
• Forgejo / Codeberg (Codeberg works out of the box; any Forgejo instance can be configured)
• Homebrew (binaries only, if anything has a dependency, it will not work at this time)
• Hashicorp (special handling for their releases, pointing to GitHub repos will automatically pass through)
• Kubernetes (special handling for their releases, pointing to GitHub repos will automatically pass through)
• Helm (special handling for Helm project releases on GitHub)

Authentication

Distillery supports authentication for GitHub, GitLab, and Forgejo/Codeberg. There are CLI options to pass in a token, but the preferred method is to set the appropriate environment variable using a tool like direnv.

Source	Environment variable	CLI flag
GitHub	DISTILLERY_GITHUB_TOKEN	--github-token
GitLab	DISTILLERY_GITLAB_TOKEN	--gitlab-token
Forgejo / Codeberg	DISTILLERY_FORGEJO_TOKEN	--forgejo-token

Directory Structure

This is the default directory structure that distillery uses. Some of this can be overridden via the configuration.

• Binaries
  • Symlinks $HOME/.distillery/bin (this should be in your $PATH variable)
  • Binaries $HOME/.distillery/opt (this is where the raw binaries are stored and symlinked to)
    • source/owner/repo/version/<binaries>
      • example: github/ekristen/aws-nuke/v2.15.0/aws-nuke
      • example: hashicorp/terraform/v0.14.7/terraform
• Cache directory (downloads, http caching)
  • MacOS $HOME/Library/Caches/distillery
  • Linux $HOME/.cache/distillery
  • Windows $HOME/AppData/Local/distillery

Caching

At the moment there are two discrete caches. One for HTTP requests and one for downloads. The HTTP cache is used to store the ETag and Last-Modified headers from the server to determine if the file has changed. The download cache is used to store the downloaded file. The download cache is not used to determine if the file has changed, that is done by the HTTP cache.

If you need to delete your cache simply run dist info identify the cache directory and remove it.

Experimental: Distillery Pass-Through Cache

Distillery includes an experimental cloud-based pass-through cache for GitHub API calls that helps avoid rate limits when you are not using a GitHub token. This is useful for public repositories when you don't want to set up authentication just to avoid rate limiting.

To enable it, set the DISTILLERY_USE_CACHE environment variable or use the --use-dist-cache flag:

export DISTILLERY_USE_CACHE=true
dist install ekristen/aws-nuke

Or per-command:

dist install --use-dist-cache ekristen/aws-nuke

Note: This only works for unauthenticated requests to public repositories. If you have DISTILLERY_GITHUB_TOKEN set, the pass-through cache is not used. The cache service only logs hits and misses for debug purposes; no other data is retained.