Re: Installing and locating scripts

[Rena <hyperhacker@...>]

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 5:35 PM, Rena <hyperhacker@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 4:56 PM, Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, 3 Mar 2013 17:36:17 -0500
>> Rena <hyperhacker@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> So, I've been developing some small applications in Lua, and one issue
>>> that's come to light is once my app is installed, if it's made up of
>>> more than one script, the main 'executable' script needs to know where
>>> to find the other scripts.
>>> It's enough to use os.getenv('PWD') .. arg[0] during testing, but that
>>> won't work if the script is in the $PATH. Unfortunately my
>>> understanding is there's no standard way to determine the current path
>>> of the executable.
>>>
>>> I'm also not sure what is the best practice when it comes to
>>> installing a program that consists of several files (the main
>>> executable and several sub-scripts it includes) on a Linux system.
>>
>> Hi Rena,
>>
>> What I'm going to talk about won't be very popular, and it's neither
>> Unixly-correct nor Windowsly-correct, but I see a couple people have
>> already suggested it.
>>
>> Having computed in the DOS era, I'm a big fan of the "everything in one
>> tree" paradigm. An install is just an tar xzvf, and an uninstall is just
>> rm -rf. Your app needs to know about few other facilities, and other
>> facilities needn't know anything about your app.
>>
>> The easiest way I've found to do this is, if your app is myapp.lua, put
>> it in an arbitrary directory along with the other files (or the other
>> files can be in subdirectories), and then in the same directory put
>> myapp.sh, whose first few lines look like this:
>>
>> =====================
>> #!/bin/bash
>> cd /whatever/myapp
>> export ENVARG1=WHATEVER1
>> export ENVARG2=WHATEVER2
>> ./myapp.lua $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6 $7
>> =====================
>> The last task is to, within /usr/local/bin or wherever on the path, put
>> a symlink to myapp.sh.
>>
>> If you want your app to truly be standalone, this is an effective way
>> to do it.
>>
>> SteveT
>>
>> Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
>> Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance
>>
>
> Thanks for all the feedback.
>
> This is the makefile I came up with:
> PROGRAM=imgview
> INSTALLDIR=/usr/local/share/$(PROGRAM)
> .PHONY: all install uninstall
>
> all:
>         @echo This program does not need to be compiled, just run \`make install\`.
>
> install:
>         mkdir -p $(INSTALLDIR)
>         ln -fs $(PROGRAM).lua /usr/local/bin/$(PROGRAM)
>         find . -name '*.lua' -not -name '$(PROGRAM).lua' \
>                 -exec ln -fs {} $(INSTALLDIR)/{} \;
>         find ./data -type d -not -name '.*' -exec mkdir -p $(INSTALLDIR)/{} \;
>         find ./data -type f -not -name '.*' -exec ln -fs {} $(INSTALLDIR)/{} \;
>
> uninstall:
>         rm /usr/local/bin/$(PROGRAM)
>         rm -r $(INSTALLDIR)
>
> I'll update it to embed the install path in the executable as well. I
> like the idea of the actual "executable" being a symlink and putting
> all of the app's actual scripts in one directory.
>
> The one thing I don't like about this method is you can change
> INSTALLDIR on the command line, but not where the executable itself is
> placed. That's easy enough to fix, but I wonder what to call that
> variable... no doubt there's standards I'm not aware of for that, too.
> Is this makefile up to spec?
>
> --
> Sent from my Game Boy.

Whoops, I should have made sure the installed program actually worked
after running that script.
PROGRAM=imgview
INSTALLDIR=/usr/local/share/$(PROGRAM)
PWD=$(shell pwd)
.PHONY: all install uninstall

all:
	@echo This program does not need to be compiled, just run \`make install\`.

install:
	mkdir -p $(INSTALLDIR)
	ln -fs $(PWD)/$(PROGRAM).lua /usr/local/bin/$(PROGRAM)
	find . -name '*.lua' -not -name '$(PROGRAM).lua' \
		-exec ln -fs $(PWD)/{} $(INSTALLDIR)/{} \;
	find ./data -type d -not -name '.*' -exec mkdir -p $(INSTALLDIR)/{} \;
	find ./data -type f -not -name '.*' -exec ln -fs $(PWD)/{} $(INSTALLDIR)/{} \;

uninstall:
	rm /usr/local/bin/$(PROGRAM)
	rm -r $(INSTALLDIR)


-- 
Sent from my Game Boy.