Update of aqua CLI Version Manager in 2022

In this post, I describe the update of aqua in 2022.

aqua is a Declarative CLI Version Manager written in Go.

https://aquaproj.github.io/

GitHub Stars increased from about 50 to 250
aqua was updated from v0.8.11 (2021-12-31) to v1.28.0 (2022-12-30)
aqua-registry was updated from v0.12.3 to v3.114.0
- Packages increased from 394 to 1,000

Pick up updates

There were too many updates to introduce all of them, so we picked up some important updates.
We have improved aqua keeping the simplicity.

2022-01-09 v0.9.0: Remove inline_registry
⭐ 2022-01-10 v0.10.0: Conform XDG Base Directory Specification
⭐ 2022-02-23 v1.0.0: Release v1 🎉
2022-02-25 v1.1.0: Add aqua g's -i option
2022-04-01 v1.3.0: Support overrides
2022-04-20 v1.4.0: Support changing GOOS and GOARCH for testing
⭐ 2022-04-26 aqua-registry supports more tools than asdf-plugins
2022-05-01 v1.5.0: Support package's alias
2022-05-12 v1.6.0: Support the experimental feature to execute commands by execve(2).
2022-06-05 v1.10.0
- Support tracing and CPU profiling for debug of performance issue
- ⭐ Support installing packages by go install command
2022-06-15 v1.11.0: Support shell completion
2022-06-22 v1.12.0
- Support supported_envs
- ⭐ Support Windows
⭐ 2022-06-26 v1.14.0: Add a subcommand generate-registry
2022-06-29 v1.15.0
- Support selecting a version interactively in aqua g command
- Support showing progress bars when tools are being installed
⭐ 2022-07-30 v1.18.0: Add a subcommand cp
⭐ 2022-08-06 Release registry-tool
⭐ 2022-10-10 v1.20.0: Support Checksum Verification
2022-11-04 v1.22.0:
- Add update-aqua command
- aqua generate: Support specifying version
2022-11-09 v1.23.0: Support filtering packages with tags
⭐ 2022-11-15 v1.24.0: Support Policy as Code
2022-11-17 v1.25.0: Replace $HOME to the home directory in local registry path
2022-12-26 ⭐ v1.26.0: Support package verification by Cosign and slsa-verifier
2022-12-26 Refactor aqua-renovate-config with Jsonnet
2022-12-30 v1.28.0: Support pruning unused checksums in aqua-checksums.json
⭐ 2022-12-31 The number of packages in aqua-registry has reached 1,000

Windows Support

We usually don't use Windows and Windows is different from Linux and macOS, so Windows Support was very tough work.
By Windows Support, aqua supports all major platforms (Windows, macOS, and Linux).
This is especially important for unifying tool management in your team. If your team members use different OS, you can install tools in the unified way and unify tool versions.

Security

In the last few months, we mainly worked on security improvement.

These features are so significant for protecting you from security threat, and we believe these features are strength of aqua.
If you haven't used these features, we strongly recommend trying them.

Evolution of aqua Registry

To make aqua more powerful, we worked on supporting more tools.
To allow users to add new tools to Registry easily, we developed a subcommand and tools to scaffold Registry and create a pull request.
Using them, users could create a pull request to add a new tool easily.
This improved the user experience and many users contributed to aqua-registry.