dbin: The easy to use, easy to get, suckless software distribution system

dbin is a simple and extensible software distribution system, it is like a package manager, but without the hassle of dependencies nor the bloat, every binary provided is statically linked or otherwise self-contained, dbin itself doesn't even require a database to track installs, all operations are atomic and stateless. Dbin is particularly well-suited for embedded systems, we support both amd64, aarch64 and riscv64.

dbin can also work on systems other than Linux, but given that we don't have repositories offering binaries for other systems, we just don't release dbin for other systems. But, creating a repo and compiling dbin are trivial matters, feel free to start your own dbin repository :)

Why?

"I tend to think the drawbacks of dynamic linking outweigh the advantages for many (most?) applications." – John Carmack. If you are looking for more in-depth arguments, see: dynlib - drewdevault.com, cat-v.ORG - Dynamic Linking

I've seen lots of package manager projects without "packages". What is different about this one?

There are currently binaries in our repos. They are all statically linked.

Features

$ dbin --help

 Copyright (c) 2024-2025: xplshn and contributors
 For more details refer to https://github.com/xplshn/dbin

  Synopsis
    dbin [-v|-h] [|list|install|remove|update|run|info|search|] <-args->
  Description:
    The easy to use, easy to get, software distribution system
  Options:
    -h, --help        Show this help message
    -v, --version     Show the version number
    --verbose         Run in extra verbose mode
    --silent          Run in silent mode, only errors will be shown
    --extra-silent    Run in extra silent mode, suppressing all output
  Commands:
    list              List all available binaries
    install, add      Install binaries
    remove, del       Remove binaries
    update            Update binaries binaries installed by dbin
    run               Run a specified binary from cache
    info              Show information about a specific binary OR display installed binaries if called without arguments
    search            Search for a binaries by supplying one or more search terms
  Variables:
    DBIN_INSTALL_DIR   If present, it must contain a valid directory path
    DBIN_CACHE_DIR     If present, it must contain a valid directory path
    DBIN_NOTRUNCATION  If present, and set to ONE (1), string truncation will be disabled
    DBIN_REOWN         If present, and set to ONE (1), it makes dbin update programs that may not have been installed by dbin
    DBIN_NOCONFIG      If present, and set to ONE (1), it makes dbin use its builtin config, it won't create or read an existing one
    DBIN_REPO_URLs     If present, it must contain one or more repository's index file urls separated by ;
  NOTE: Check out `config --show` to see all parameters and their env vars

Examples

    dbin search editor
    dbin install micro.upx
    dbin install lux kakoune aretext shfmt
    dbin --silent install bed && echo "[bed] was installed to $INSTALL_DIR/bed"
    dbin del bed
    dbin del orbiton tgpt lux
    dbin info
    dbin info | grep a-utils | xargs dbin add # install the entire a-utils suite
    dbin info jq
    dbin list --detailed
    dbin tldr gum
    dbin --verbose run curl -qsfSL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xplshn/dbin/master/stubdl" | sh -
    dbin --silent run --transparent micro ~/.profile
    dbin run chromium.dwfs.AppBundle "https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=77G7ZFXVZ44EE" # Donate?

Features

• Ability to install specific versions of binaries (by specifying the Snapshot you want to install of it)
• Ability to use user-curated repositories, as the format for the repository indexes is quite simple Note that a repo index for dbin can be in either of these formats:
  • JSON: For ease of use
  • CBOR: To optimize the time it takes to load the repo
  • YAML: Because this library is already used for the config, so, why not? The repo indexes can be compressed as .gz or .zst, this is specially useful for large catalogs of programs
• Hooks. dbin can run a set of commands or a script, whenever a binary of file with a certain extension is being installed. The user can also specify uninstall hooks
• dbin can work without a config, and it can also run from RAM
• No breaking changes. Old releases of dbin do not break, until after at least 3 releases of newer versions.
• dbin will survive even if the upstream repo disappears. dbin has a repository index that is held in its own repo. And given that the upstream binaries are held & built in GHCR, all build logs and binaries will continue to be usable/downloadable even if pkgforge disappears or experiences downtime
• The binaries in dbin are specifically filtered for portability (meaning, they work on older kernel versions, they work on Musl and Glibc and even weird yet wonderful systems like AliceLinux, OasisLinux or FreeBSD (with linuxlator, so that you don't have to set up an Ubuntu chroot to install a Linux web browser and be able to watch DRM content, etc)

What are these optional flags?

Flags that correspond to the run functionality

In the case of --transparent, it runs the program from $PATH and if it isn't available in the user's $PATH it will pull the binary from dbin's repos and run it from cache.

Update arguments:

Update can receive an optional list of specific binaries to update OR no arguments at all. When update receives no arguments it updates everything that is both found in the repos and in your $DBIN_INSTALL_DIR (unless $DBIN_REOWN=1, dbin will not update binaries it didn't install. It won't modify symlinks either).

Arguments of info

When info is called with no arguments, it displays all binaries which were installed by dbin. When it is called with a binary's name as argument, info will display as much information of it as is available.

Example:

$ dbin info micro
Name: micro#github.com.zyedidia.micro
Pkg ID: github.com.zyedidia.micro
Pretty Name: micro
Description: Modern and intuitive terminal-based text editor
Version: HEAD-7d16dcd-250311T073524
Download URL: oci://ghcr.io/pkgforge/bincache/micro/official/micro:HEAD-7d16dcd-250311T073524-x86_64-linux
Size: 14 MB
B3SUM: b6f32b2b8ff4b5abad126c4d0d466549f91c12eedafbc9826d0673b91d10eea9
SHA256: 3a9278b2be59a8c1fd87647f65d0cfcb9c707e823713045e93af183610ef8102
Build Date: 2025-03-12T03:02:06Z
Build Script: https://github.com/pkgforge/soarpkgs/blob/main/binaries/micro/static.official.source.yaml
Build Log: https://api.ghcr.pkgforge.dev/pkgforge/bincache/micro/official/micro?tag=HEAD-7d16dcd-250311T073524-x86_64-linux&download=micro.log
Rank: 1102
Snapshots: HEAD-9b3f7ff-250119T130748-x86_64-linux [2.0.14]

Arguments of list

list can receive the optional argument --detailed/-d. It will display all binaries + their description

Arguments of search

search can only receive various search terms, if the name of a binary or a description of a binary contains the term, it is shown as a search result. search can optionally receive a --limit argument, which changes the limit on how many search results can be displayed (default is 90) (you can also put this in your config)

Getting Started

To begin using dbin, simply run one of these commands on your Linux/FreeBSD+Linuxlator system. No additional setup is required. You may also build the project using go build or go install

Use without installing

wget -qO- "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xplshn/dbin/master/stubdl" | sh -s -- --help

Install to ~/.local/bin

wget -qO- "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xplshn/dbin/master/stubdl" | sh -s -- --install "$HOME/.local/bin/dbin"

Examples of usage cases of dbin

Inside of a SH script

Whenever you want to pull a specific GNU coreutil, busybox, toybox, etc, insert a bash snippet, use a *fetch tool, etc, you can use dbin for the job! There's also a --transparent flag for run, which will use the users' installed version of the program you want to run, and if it is not found in the $PATH dbin will fetch it and run it from $DBIN_CACHEDIR.

system_info=$(wget -qO- "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xplshn/dbin/master/stubdl" | sh -s -- run --silent albafetch --no-logo - || curl -qsfSL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xplshn/dbin/master/stubdl" | sh -s -- run --silent albafetch --no-logo -)

For creating a statically-linked & bootable rootfs using toybox's mkroot

dbin uses a format for defining the repository index file that is derived from the endpoints provided by Pkgforge. During this step, we remove unportable programs and re-order variants based on their ID (smaller binaries are prioritized)

dbin is a package manager, which can use any repos. But it comes with a strong default selection by default.

Hmm, can I add my own repos?

Yup, you'll need to provide a repository index, a JSON (or CBOR/YAML) (it can optionally be compressed | as .gz or .zst) file like this:

{
 "SillyRepo": [
  {
   "pkg": "a-utils/ed",
   "pkg_name": "ed",
   "pkg_id": "github.com.xplshn.a-utils",
   "icon": "https://api.ghcr.pkgforge.dev/pkgforge/bincache/a-utils/official/ed?tag=0.0.5-x86_64-linux\u0026download=ed.png",
   "description": "ed from u-root but with syntax highlighting",
   "version": "0.0.5",
   "download_url": "oci://ghcr.io/pkgforge/bincache/a-utils/official/ed:0.0.5-x86_64-linux",
   "size": "5.4 MB",
   "bsum": "1f0213b604bf964dbd2ad0dbaddab1c6a64e5da7ea89febcbdb9de337a081d19",
   "shasum": "e2deb5cb912858603900a890630876e0830a9a912d2a71c05742b697c98bc768",
   "build_date": "2025-01-21T02:21:53Z",
   "src_urls": [
    "https://github.com/xplshn/a-utils"
   ],
   "web_urls": [
    "https://github.com/xplshn/a-utils",
    "https://github.com/xplshn/Andes"
   ],
   "build_script": "https://github.com/pkgforge/soarpkgs/blob/main/binaries/a-utils/static.official.stable.yaml",
   "build_log": "https://api.ghcr.pkgforge.dev/pkgforge/bincache/a-utils/official/ed?tag=0.0.5-x86_64-linux\u0026download=ed.log",
   "snapshots": [
    {
     "commit": "0.0.5-x86_64-linux",
     "version": "0.0.5"
    }
   ],
   "notes": [
    "Pre Built Binary Fetched from Upstream. Check/Report @ https://github.com/xplshn/a-utils"
   ],
   "rank": 1012
  },
... More Entries here ...
}

NOTE: Not all fields are essential :)

A schema of the metadata format can be found here /misc/cmd/dbinRepoIndexGenerators/*/generator.go

Acknowledgements

Default repos

NOTE: All of them are based on external sources, except AppBundleHUB. As I'm not a package maintainer. The default repos come within the same file

• PkgForge's repos: External repository with Portable programs that are truly static, or otherwise self-contained using a wrapper format
  • Pkgcache: 203
    • Detailed repo info: https://docs.pkgforge.dev/repositories/pkgcache
    • Package request doc: https://docs.pkgforge.dev/repositories/pkgcache/package-request
  • Bincache: 3921
    • Detailed repo info: https://docs.pkgforge.dev/repositories/bincache
    • Package request doc: https://docs.pkgforge.dev/repositories/bincache/package-request
  • Note however that pkgforge also has dynamic (unportable) programs/packages (that only run on Debian & derivatives), dbin filters these out, leaving behind only the static/portable programs. These are a minority of the programs included.
• AppBundleHub: Only self-hosted repository: Portable programs in .AppBundle format
  • 27

Endpoints

• Lite (recommended): https://d.xplshn.com.ar/misc/cmd/1.6/amd64_linux.lite.cbor.zst: .lite version doesn't include all possible fields of dbin info, only those which are relevant to the user & are used by dbin. Namely: {Web Manifest, Sha256, Screenshots, IconURL, Provides, AppsStreamID, LongDescription}
• NLite (default): https://d.xplshn.com.ar/misc/cmd/1.6/amd64_linux.nlite.cbor.zst: .nlite is like .lite, but includes all the fields that upstream forces me to. Namely: "Web Manifest"
• Complete: https://d.xplshn.com.ar/misc/cmd/1.6/amd64_linux.cbor.zst: opposite of .lite, contains all fields of the DbinItem type defined in the repository generators at misc/cmd/dbinRepoIndexGenerators/*/generator.go

It makes no difference which endpoint you choose. .lite will be the best option for embedded hardware, unmarshalling the Complete endpoint is slow on embedded hardware, from experience, even for the MT7622 router.

NOTE: If you're using an Opteron Venus or similar ancient CPU, it may be better to use the uncompressed .lite endpoint, as the bottleneck is your CPU, not network

Optional repos

• AM repo: External repository with not-so portable programs that work only on glibc-based distros. The packages come from the AM package manager

  • 2302
  • NOTE: Scrapped by pkgforge. Adapted to dbin format at dbin-metadata
  • URL: https://d.xplshn.com.ar/misc/cmd/1.6/AM_amd64_linux.lite.cbor.zst

• PkgForge Go repo: External repository with Portable truly static programs, they are the result of scrapping various sources with Go repositories and compilng them. You can read more about the process at the docs of the upstream project: https://docs.pkgforge.dev/repositories/external/pkgforge-go

  • The binaries in this repo are Go projects that have been fetched, filtered and built automagically
  • 10531
  • URL: https://d.xplshn.com.ar/misc/cmd/1.6/pkgforge-go_amd64_linux.lite.cbor.zst

• PkgForge Cargo repo:

  • The binaries in this repo are Rust projects that have been fetched, filtered and built automagically
  • 4583
  • URL: https://d.xplshn.com.ar/misc/cmd/1.6/pkgforge-cargo_amd64_linux.lite.cbor.zst

Libraries

I am using these libraries for dbin:

1. https://github.com/urfave/cli (v3)
2. https://github.com/hedzr/progressbar (an attractive-looking progressbar, but with a messy API and codebase. Currently the only good alternative to mpb/v8+)
3. https://github.com/goccy/go-json (index files can be .json)
4. https://github.com/goccy/go-yaml (config && index files can be .yaml)
5. https://github.com/klauspost/compress (index files can be .zst && .gz)
6. https://github.com/fxamacker/cbor (index files can be .cbor)
7. https://github.com/zeebo/blake3 (checksums)
8. https://golang.org/x/term

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Whether you've found a bug, have a feature request, or wish to improve the documentation, your input is valuable. Fork the repository, make your changes, and submit a pull request. Together, we can make dbin even more powerful and simpler. If you can provide repos that meet the requirements to add them to dbin, I'd be grateful.

License

dbin is licensed under the ISC (equivalent to MIT but without unnecessary legal wording) or RABRMS Licenses, choose whichever fits your needs best.

Its pretty safe to state that we are