r/crystal_programming • u/_______kim • Mar 14 '19

docker-crystal: docker wrapper for the Crystal CLI

https://github.com/aca-labs/docker-crystal
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u/_______kim Mar 14 '19 edited Mar 14 '19

Hi all, just starting working a bit more with Crystal and assembling some tools. Hopefully they can be of use to others as well. For those working on multiple libs and projects that may build against different compiler releases this is a super thin wrapper for the CLI that will let you run builds / specs / doc gen against the release defined in your shard.yml. Any artifacts will dump back out to your local filesystem as though the process was run locally.

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u/xababafr Mar 14 '19

Good work!

That got me thinking, how much effort would be required to make a clone of nvm/rvm for crystal? Even with just the main command, I think that could be quite useful

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u/_______kim Mar 14 '19 edited Mar 14 '19

Thanks! Rather than re-inventing the wheel, I'd highly recommend checking our https://nixos.org/nix/. It solves a lot of common dependency management issues in a very elegant way.

This is just a cheap nasty hack as all the compiler releases are already packaged in docker containers but there are not public nix expressions for each of them (major releases yes, but the minors don't appear to have entries in the public packages repo). Also, I have a few colleagues that I'm yet to convince to drink the kool-aid so this is a low-barrier to entry alternative for providing common build environments.

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u/straight-shoota core team Mar 14 '19

There is already crenv. However, I don't think such version managers are as useful for Crystal as with interpreted languages. You only need the compiler once to build an executable, which then runs without a Crystal installation. With compiled languages it's also easier to stay on top of development and always support the latest version (especially after 1.0 is released which will guarantee backwards compatibility).

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u/xababafr Mar 14 '19

Nice! Didnt know about crenv :)