Porrith Suong / binget

Created Wed, 05 Mar 2025 10:52:54 -0500 Modified Wed, 05 Mar 2025 09:18:25 -0800
425 Words
cli c#

A little while ago I wrote a small client, binget, formerly called LspManager, to automate pulling the latest binaries from Github Releases from repos I mainly use. This was mainly to pull debuggers and LSPs executables because of my setup with Neovim.

I wrote this in C# because I wanted to

  • a. Do more C# in a .NET environment
    • I’ve mainly been doing mono with Unity for the longest time, which is a slightly different environment.
    • If I were to create DLLs, they would strictly target C# 9 and .NET 2.1 Standard. (I was being really patient with CoreCLR integration in Unity but it looks like it’s taking longer, understandably.)
    • On a side note, I am doing a lot of .NET 8 (and .NET Standard 2.1) dlls for games! (I’ll be dabbling with Vulkan/OpenGL for C#. Of course, depending on how much time I have.)
  • b. Play around with NativeAOT compilation pipeline.
    • I would only create Native DLLs with C++ and Rust and interop them C#. Although fun, sometimes I don’t want to create the bindings manually and I haven’t had the time to look into an automated process yet (or build one).
  • c. Although not exclusive to C#, I also wanted to play with Github actions. Being in games, I often work with custom pipelines that are not usually on Github.

So what does binget do?

binget reads from a config.toml that you supply. There you would define

  • the base url to download from,
  • the repositories to get the contents
  • the target you actually want

An example would be the following:

url = "https://api.github.com/repos/"
destination = "your-destination-path"

[[repositories]]
name = "OmniSharp/omnisharp-roslyn"
target = "omnisharp-win-x64.zip"
display = "omnisharp"

[[repositories]]
name = "LuaLS/lua-language-server"
target = "win32-x64.zip"
display = "lua"

[[repositories]]
name = "shader-slang/slang"
target = "windows-x86_64.zip"
display = "slang"

You would execute binget.exe /path/to/your/config.toml and would get a screen similar to the following in your terminal:

➜ .\binget.exe .\config.toml
[Url]: https://api.github.com/repos/OmniSharp/omnisharp-roslyn/releases/latest, [Target]: omnisharp-win-x64.zip, [Zip]: \language-servers\omnisharp-win-x64.zip
██████████████████████████████████████████████████ 100.0% - https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-roslyn/releases/download/v1.39.13/omnisharp-win-x64.zip.zip
Cleaned up zip and extracted to: \language-servers\omnisharp

[Url]: https://api.github.com/repos/LuaLS/lua-language-server/releases/latest, [Target]: win32-x64.zip, [Zip]: \language-servers\lua-language-server-3.13.6-win32-x64.zip
██████████████████████████████████████████████████ 100.0% - https://github.com/LuaLS/lua-language-server/releases/download/3.13.6/lua-language-server-3.13.6-win32-x64.zip
Cleaned up zip and extracted to: \language-servers\lua

[Url]: https://api.github.com/repos/shader-slang/slang/releases/latest, [Target]: windows-x86_64.zip, [Zip]: \language-servers\slang-2025.6.1-windows-x86_64.zip
██████████████████████████████████████████████████ 100.0% - https://github.com/shader-slang/slang/releases/download/v2025.6.1/slang-2025.6.1-windows-x86_64.zip
Cleaned up zip and extracted to: \language-servers\slang

Now this utility is supposed to kept pretty minimal, so versioning is not supported, I just pull the latest. Since the utility pipes everything to console, I kept the console logic pretty minimal too. I.e, if I am outputting too much for a single console to contain, I just leave don’t output the content that’s offscreen.