Verdure

© 2020-2025 Reuben Thomas rrt@sc3d.org
https://github.com/rrthomas/verdure

Verdure runs a particular version of a program, first installing it if necessary. (Users might be interested in the more capable Spack or pkgx.)

Verdure is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL version 3 (or, at your option, any later version).

Please send questions, comments, and bug reports to the maintainer, or report them on the project’s web page (see above for addresses).

Installation

Verdure requires Python 3.9 or later. To install it, run:

pip install verdure

Use

Sometimes you want to run a particular version of a program: to track down a bug in a program you use, to test a particular commit of code you’re working on, or because you’ve never gotten around to updating that crucial script to use the latest version of that program.

With verdure, you can say

verdure -- foo 1.3 --frobnicate wibble bar

and verdure will run foo --frobnicate wibble bar with foo version 1.3.

Programs are installed in $XDG_CACHE_DIR/verdure/PROGRAM/VERSION. There must be an executable in that directory called PROGRAM, and any other files required for the installation can be stored there.

The -- tells verdure that it should not try to parse what follows as options for itself. Otherwise, it might interpret some flags itself: for example, if you say verdure foo 1.3 --version then verdure will print its own version and not even try to run foo.

See verdure --help for further options.

Installing programs automatically

Programs can be installed manually, but verdure can install them automatically. To do this, use the --install-cmd argument:

verdure --install-cmd='wget https://www.example.com/$PROGRAM/$VERSION/$PROGRAM; chmod +x $PROGRAM' -- foo 1.3 --frobnicate wibble bar

The command is passed to sh -c with the environment variables PROGRAM and VERSION set to the values passed to verdure and PROGRAM_ENV set to the name of a shell file that can have environment variables and commands appended to it, and executed in the installation directory.

Installation packages, source tarballs, Git checkouts and similar directories of files used to build and install a program should be unpacked, checked out etc. into a directory called PROGRAM-VERSION.

Installation helpers

Automatic installation alone is still not that useful! Verdure’s real usefulness is its pre-written installation helpers. These are programs whose name starts verdure-, so you can see what is available by typing verdure- and pressing TAB in most shells. The supplied scripts will tell you more about themselves with --help.

The simplest installations are those of packages from an existing packaging system, such as the Python Package Index. For example, to run a Python program:

verdure --install-cmd 'verdure-pip $PROGRAM==$VERSION' -- rpl 1.7.2 --version

Verdure also comes with helpers for building packages from source, which use the standard ./configure and make combination (most commonly, with the GNU build system). Here’s an example with a program that has a GNU autotools build system:

verdure --install-cmd \
    'verdure-tarball https://github.com/rrthomas/$PROGRAM/releases/download/v$VERSION/$PROGRAM-$VERSION.tar.gz && \
    (cd $PROGRAM-$VERSION && verdure-configure-make)' \
    -- beetle 3.0.2 --version