Chef

Personal package manager

Why it exists

This is useful for those binaries that are not packaged by a distro.

With chef you can:

Install a random binary
Keep it up-to-date
Run it
Automatically create desktop entries for GUI applications when specified in recipes

Quick Start (Zero Config)

Install Chef globally to manage your binaries from anywhere:

deno install -gA jsr:@sigmasd/chef

# Now you can use the chef command directly
chef gui
chef list

GUI Application

Chef comes with a GTK4 graphical user interface. You can install it as a permanent desktop application:

chef gui --install

Chef GUI

Customizing Recipes

By default, Chef uses a recipes file located in your cache directory. To customize your recipes, you can create a local script (e.g., chef.ts):

import { $, Chef } from "jsr:@sigmasd/chef";
import { getLatestGithubRelease } from "jsr:@sigmasd/chef/utils";

const chef = new Chef();

chef.add({
  name: "irust",
  download: async ({ latestVersion }) => {
    await $.request(
      `https://github.com/sigmaSd/IRust/releases/download/${latestVersion}/irust-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu`,
    ).showProgress().pipeToPath();
    await Deno.chmod("./irust-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu", 0o555);
    return {
      exe: "./irust-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu",
    };
  },
  version: () => getLatestGithubRelease("sigmaSd/IRust"),
  desktopFile: {
    comment: "Rust REPL",
    categories: "Development;",
    terminal: true,
  },
});

await chef.start(import.meta.url);

Running your custom script

# Run your script directly
deno run -A chef.ts list

# You can also install your custom script as the global 'chef' command
deno install -gA -n chef chef.ts
chef gui

Multiple Recipe Scripts

You can have multiple chef scripts for different purposes (e.g., lsp.ts, work.ts). Each script manages its own set of binaries and settings independently because of the import.meta.url passed to chef.start().

deno run -A lsp.ts update
deno run -A work.ts list

External Providers

Chef supports external providers, which allow you to integrate other package managers or custom binary sources. Providers are external commands that communicate with Chef using a JSON-based protocol.

You can use the Chef provider SDK to create your own providers.

Example provider: rustman (A provider for Rust binaries).

Managing Providers

# Add a provider
chef provider add rustman "deno run -A jsr:@sigmasd/rustman"

# List providers
chef provider list

# Remove a provider
chef provider remove rustman

Once a provider is added, its binaries will appear in chef list and can be managed just like native recipes.

CLI Commands

chef update to update all binaries
chef list to list currently installed binaries
chef run ${binary} $args to run an installed binary
chef link ${binary} to create a symlink in ~/.cache/chef/exports (add this to your PATH!)
chef gui [--install | --uninstall] manage the Chef GUI application
chef desktop-file [create | remove] <binary> manually manage desktop entries
chef --version show chef version