Please provide a way to turn off auto-install

[magnusviri]

Ansible is a tool that allows administrators to run commands on many computers over ssh and using python. If one of the computers is missing python, pkgx will start to install it. However Ansible times out and it never gets installed and instead it prints out an error message that makes no sense. It took me a long time to figure out that Ansible was failing because python was missing locally and that pkgx was attempting to install it but that it ultimately failed. It would be nice if I could just turn off auto-install, especially on systems that are considered high security.

[jhheider]

this is an interesting one. It's basically the opposite of this: https://docs.pkgx.sh/pkgx/pkgx#ensuring-packages

which means you could write something mash to wrap pkgx to... well, it's tough. specifically bailing if python is absent is easy, but the general case of not downloading isn't.

obviously command -v python 2>&1 && ansible should work, but it doesn't help the case of invoking ansible directly. pkgx mash ensure python beforehand would work, but by doing the thing you don't want, which is installing python.

thorny.

[jhheider]

quick check of the codebase suggests putting an escape hatch in resolve.rs around line 86 would do it.

  if !resolution.pending.is_empty() {
      if std::env::var("PKGX_NO_INSTALL").is_ok() {
          return Err(/* error listing missing packages */);
      }
      let installed = install_multi(&resolution.pending, config, spinner.arc()).await?;
      installations.extend(installed);
  }

but... possibly setting PKGX_DIST_URL=http://localhost might work too. it'll at least give you fast-fail:

pkgx % ~/.pkgx/pkgx.sh/v2.7.0/bin/pkgx sk --version
sk 1.11.2
pkgx % rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/pkgx/ ~/.pkgx/crates.io/skim
pkgx % PKGX_DIST_URL=http://localhost ~/.pkgx/pkgx.sh/v2.7.0/bin/pkgx sk --version
Error: reqwest::Error { kind: Request, url: "http://localhost/crates.io/skim/darwin/aarch64/versions.txt", source: hyper_util::client::legacy::Error(Connect, ConnectError("tcp connect error", Os { code: 61, kind: ConnectionRefused, message: "Connection refused" })) }