Mush

Mush is the shell package builder. Mush downloads your shell package’s dependencies, compiles your packages, makes distributable packages, and uploads them to GitHub, as public community’s package registry. You can contribute to this project on GitHub.

This project is mostly inspired by Rust and Cargo!

Get Started

The easiest way to get Mush is to install the current stable release from GitHub by using curl. Installing Mush using curl will also create a directory at $HOME/.mush/bin where you can host the scripts you’ll install subsequently.

On Linux and macOS systems, this is done as follows:

$ curl get.javanile.org/mush | sh

First Steps with Mush

This section provides a quick sense for the mush command line tool. We demonstrate its ability to generate a new package for us, its ability to compile the shell binary within the package, and its ability to run the resulting program.

To start a new package with Mush, use mush new:

$ mush new hello_world

Mush defaults to --bin to make a binary program. To make a library, we would pass --lib, instead.

Let’s check out what Mush has generated for us:

$ cd hello_world
$ tree .
.
├── Manifest.toml
└── src
    └── main.sh

1 directory, 2 files

This is all we need to get started. First, let’s check out Manifest.toml:

[package]
name = "hello_world"
version = "0.1.0"
edition = "2022"

[dependencies]

This is called a manifest, and it contains all of the metadata that Mush needs to compile your package.

Here’s what’s in src/main.sh:

main() {
    echo "Hello, world!"
}

Mush generated a “hello world” program for us, otherwise known as a binary. Let’s compile it:

$ mush build
   Compiling hello_world v0.1.0 (file:///path/to/package/hello_world)

And then run it:

$ ./target/debug/hello_world
Hello, world!

We can also use mush run to compile and then run it, all in one step:

$ mush run
     Fresh hello_world v0.1.0 (file:///path/to/package/hello_world)
   Running `target/hello_world`
Hello, world!

Going further

For more details on using Mush, check out the CLI Commands