It’s been a year since I released the first version of my open source project dra, a command line tool to download release assets from GitHub.

This is the side project I’ve been working on for the longest time, and I’m really happy of how it turned out!

In this article, I’ll have a look at past, present and future of dra.

Why?

Everything started while refactoring my dotfiles and was annoyed by some packages from GitHub release with fixed version in the url, that I needed to update occasionally to download the latest release.

curl -L -o bat.deb https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/releases/download/v0.18.3/bat_0.18.3_amd64.deb
#                                                                    ~~~~~~     ~~~~~~
#                                                                    ^ the latest release is 0.22.1!

So I built this CLI tool called dra that allows to download the latest release asset from a repository (with interactive and non-interactive modes).

dra download -o bat.deb -s "bat_{tag}_amd64.deb" sharkdp/bat
#                       ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
#                       ^ non-interactive mode

You can find more examples in the usage docs section.

State of the Project

The GitHub repository is slowly reaching 100 stars (currently at 78) and the total downloads of all releases is close to 600 🎉.

dra was initially created for Linux (x86_64), but since 0.4.0 it’s available on macOS and Windows as well. From the latest release 0.4.2, it’s also available for Linux on armv6 and arm64.

The platform that downloaded the most dra was Linux with 547 downloads (x86_64 and arm).

For the time being, it seems that fewer users are interested on macOS and Windows versions (12 downloads combined).

On the other hand, Linux arm versions have 31 downloads combined with just one release!

Rust

I chose Rust as the programming language to build dra for a couple of reasons:

• Keep exploring this language that I was already learning
• It’s really nice to write Rust once you get used to it (especially CLI)
• Creates a single binary that is easy to distribute

I use different languages (mostly typescript) at work, but every time I had to write some code for dra I was surprised that Rust didn’t get it the way but made coding a great experience!

Although Rust is not a functional programming language, you can find a lot of nice things from the functional world like immutability, Option, Result (similar to Either), etc. that allowed me to follow my usual programming style. The main takeaway I have is to avoid trying to write pure FP because Rust is not suitable for it, but instead combine FP with the Rust way.

Since I’m not using Rust every day, I had to pay more attention to the borrow checker, that makes you think about what you’re writing more carefully than in other languages.

There are some things for the cross-platform work that I didn’t like, but this could also be for my lack of experience and knowledge on these topics.

For example, one feature of dra allows extracting an executable file from a compressed archive (tar or zip), and I had two different implementation for Unix and Windows:

#[cfg(target_family = "unix")]
fn is_executable_file(path: &Path, metadata: std::fs::Metadata) -> bool {
	// ...
}
 
#[cfg(target_os = "windows")]
fn is_executable_file(path: &Path, metadata: std::fs::Metadata) -> bool {
	// ...
}

If you omit the function with target_os = "windows" you won’t have an error until you compile on Windows. As I develop on Ubuntu, sometimes it happened that I forgot to add the Windows function and only found out later when the Windows CI was broken!

I’m wondering if there could be a better way to tell the developer “Hey, you miss this function X for the target Y” and reduce the feedback loop time.

Open source

One of the thing I liked the most about this project is that there were a couple of persons that contributed to dra.

When you see other developers improving something you created is always a great feeling and moves forward the project with ideas you didn’t event think about. Thanks to everyone who contributed in any way to dra :)

Here are some features that were added:

• Distributing dra on Arch Linux (#2 and #63)
• Download assets from a specific release (#5)
• Improve UX by showing download progress (#18)
• Download source code archives (#59)

Future plans

I still have a couple of ideas to further improve dra, especially after using it for a year.

One of the thing I observed when using dra in scripts, is that it becomes noisy due to the long list of options you can pass to the CLI, for example:

dra download -i -s "bat-v{tag}-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz" -o ~/.local/bin sharkdp/bat

This is just one example that come to mind, if you have any suggestion feel free to open a discussion or an issue on the GitHub repository!