Ubi Backend

You may install GitHub Releases and URL packages directly using ubi backend. ubi is directly compiled into the mise codebase so it does not need to be installed separately to be used. ubi is preferred over asdf/vfox for new tools since it doesn't require a plugin, supports Windows, and is really easy to use.

ubi doesn't require plugins or even any configuration for each tool. What it does is try to deduce what the proper binary/tarball is from GitHub releases and downloads the right one. As long as the vendor uses a somewhat standard labeling scheme for their releases, ubi should be able to figure it out.

The code for this is inside of the mise repository at ./src/backend/ubi.rs.

Usage

The following installs the latest version of goreleaser and sets it as the active version on PATH:

$ mise use -g ubi:goreleaser/goreleaser
$ goreleaser --version
1.25.1

The version will be set in ~/.config/mise/config.toml with the following format:

[tools]
"ubi:goreleaser/goreleaser" = "latest"

Tool Options

The following tool-options are available for the ubi backend—these go in [tools] in mise.toml.

exe

The exe option allows you to specify the executable name in the archive. This is useful when the archive contains multiple executables.

If you get an error like could not find any files named cli in the downloaded zip file, you can use the exe option to specify the executable name:

[tools]
"ubi:cli/cli" = { version = "latest", exe = "gh" } # github's cli

matching

Set a string to match against the release filename when there are multiple files for your OS/arch, i.e. "gnu" or "musl". Note that this is only used when there is more than one matching release filename for your OS/arch. If only one release asset matches your OS/arch, then this will be ignored.

[tools]
"ubi:BurntSushi/ripgrep" = { matching = "musl" }

Supported Ubi Syntax

• GitHub shorthand for latest release version: ubi:goreleaser/goreleaser
• GitHub shorthand for specific release version: ubi:goreleaser/[email protected]
• URL syntax: ubi:https://github.com/goreleaser/goreleaser/releases/download/v1.16.2/goreleaser_Darwin_arm64.tar.gz

Troubleshooting ubi

ubi resolver can't find os/arch

Sometimes vendors use strange formats for their releases that ubi can't figure out, possibly for a specific os/arch combination. For example this recently happend in this ticket because a vendor used "mac" instead of the more common "macos" or "darwin" tags.

Try using ubi by itself to see if the issue is related to mise or ubi:

ubi -p jdx/mise
./bin/mise -v # yes this technically means you could do `mise use ubi:jdx/mise` though I don't know why you would

ubi picks the wrong tarball

Another issue is that a GitHub release may have a bunch of tarballs, some that don't contain the CLI you want, you can use the matching field in order to specify a string to match against the release.

mise use ubi:tamasfe/taplo[matching=full]
# or with ubi directly
ubi -p tamasfe/taplo -m full

ubi can't find the binary in the tarball

ubi assumes that the repo name is the same as the binary name, however that is often not the case. For example, BurntSushi/ripgrep gives us a binary named rg not ripgrep. In this case, you can specify the binary name with the exe field:

mise use ubi:BurntSushi/ripgrep[exe=rg]
# or with ubi directly
ubi -p BurntSushi/ripgrep -e rg

ubi uses weird versions

This issue is actually with mise and not with ubi. mise needs to be able to list the available versions of the tools so that "latest" points to whatever is the actual latest release of the CLI. What sometimes happens is vendors will have GitHub releases for unrelated things. For example, cargo-bins/cargo-binstall is the repo for cargo-binstall, however it has a bunch of releases for unrelated CLIs that are not cargo-binstall. We need to filter these out and that can be specified with the tag_regex tool option:

mise use 'ubi:cargo-bins/cargo-binstall[tag_regex=^\d+\.]'

Now when running mise ls-remote ubi:cargo-bins/cargo-binstall[tag_regex=^\d+\.] you should only see versions starting with a number. Note that this command is cached so you likely will need to run mise cache clear first.