Headless Installs

[ProfessorManhattan]

Hey, cool tool but zap install --silent etcher fails. It looks like it cannot do headless installs right now. I would love to handle all my appimages with a tool like this. I think this is the best one out so far but the headless installs are the main reason why I'm using something like this anyway.

I tried yes | zap install --silent etcher but that didn't work either

[srevinsaju]

This would be a good feature, but I wasn't sure how we could figure out the right version to install. Right now, zap install --silent libresprite would fail with an error message

[FATAL] 2022/12/08 11:45:53 main.main:main.go:163 prompt is disabled because user has requested silence

This is because it found a few bunch of releases and it doesn't know which one of the release you would be interested it. zap tries it best to do a semantic version sort, but at times, the app developers do not use a fixed sem ver in their release names, and that messes up the installation algorithm. This is why I did not automate this, since that would have brought some unexpected surprises. Let me know if you have any ideas. I think I could add a --select-first flag, or something like that which will always select the first item, but know that, the first item on the list may or may not be the latest release.

[ProfessorManhattan]

Thanks @srevinsaju -- --select-first would be great. I personally think it should be assumed that --silent will make assumptions but I can see why you didn't do that.

[markuspeitl]

I also did not have any success getting headless interaction to work with zap.
I tried the "yes" command,
using a << pipe to write "Enter + y + y" to the stdinof the process
and writing an "expect" script trying to automatically answer the printed questions.
Having native headless support for zap would be pretty nice for my purposes, i frequently do collect my applications in lists to automatically install them on a new system.

Another option would be to go the npm route and embed the version in the package name separated by an "@" like this:

zap install firefox@firefox-nightly
zap install firefox@firefox-beta`
zap install cpu-x@v4.5.2

Once zap can figure out the latest version or the latest stable version, something like

zap install cpu-x@latest
zap install cpu-x@beta
zap install cpu-x@stable

would be an additional option for targeting different types of releases or branches.