Developers: I will never ever do that, no one should ever do that, and you should be ashamed for guiding people to. I get that you want to make things easy for end users, but at least exercise some bare minimum common sense.
The worst part is that bun is just a single binary, so the install script is bloody pointless.
Bonus mildly infuriating is the mere existence of the .sh TLD.
Edit b/c I’m not going to answer the same goddamned questions 100 times from people who blindly copy/paste the question from StackOverflow into their code/terminal:
WhY iS ThaT woRSe thAn jUst DoWnlOADing a BinAary???
- Downloading the compiled binary from the release page (if you don’t want to build yourself) has been a way to acquire software since shortly after the dawn of time. You already know what you’re getting yourself into
- There are SHA256 checksums of each binary file available in each release on Github. You can confirm the binary was not tampered with by comparing a locally computed checksum to the value in the release’s checksums file.
- Binaries can also be signed (not that signing keys have never leaked, but it’s still one step in the chain of trust)
- The install script they’re telling you to pipe is not hosted on Github. A misconfigured / compromised server can allow a bad actor to tamper with the install script that gets piped directly into your shell. The domain could also lapse and be re-registered by a bad actor to point to a malicious script. Really, there’s lots of things that can go wrong with that.
The point is that it is bad practice to just pipe a script to be directly executed in your shell. Developers should not normalize that bad practice.
Installing Rust: curl --proto ‘=https’ --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh (source)
Installing Homebrew: /bin/bash -c “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)” (source)
I understand that you find it infuriating, but it’s not something completely uncommon, even in high end projects :/
That’s how you know they care, no MIMing that stuff without hijacking the CA at which point you have a whole another set of problems, and if you trust rustc to not delete your sources when they fail a typecheck, then you can trust their installer.
-fis important to not execute half-downloaded scripts on failure,-sand-Sare verbosity options,-Lfollow redirects.So I was wondering what the flags do too, to check if this is any safer. My curl manual does not say that
-fwill not output half downloaded files, only that it will fail on HTTP response codes of 400 it greater… Did you test that it does not emit the part that it got on network error? At least with the$()that timing attack won’t work, because you only start executing when curl completes…With the caveat that I’m currently blanking on the semantics of sub-shells yes I think you’re right,
-fis about not executing<hmtl><h1>404 Not Found</h1></html>. Does curl output half-transferred documents to stdout in the first place, though, and alsobash -cis going to hit the command line length limit at some point.And no I haven’t tried anything of this. I use a distribution, I have a package installer.
See the proof of concept for the pipe detection mentioned elsewhere in the thread https://github.com/Stijn-K/curlbash_detect . For that to work, curl has to send to stdout without having all data yet. Most reasonable scripts won’t be large enough, and will probably be buffered in full, though, I guess.
Thanks for the laugh on the package installer, haha.
Just skimmed through
rustup-init.shand executing half-downloaded things is not an issue, it’s all function declarations, oneset -uand one variable declaration (without side effects) before the last line of the script kicks off everything withmain "$@" || exit 1. It’s also a dash/bash/ksh/zsh/whatever-polyglot, someone put a lot of thought in this. Also it’s actually just figuring out the architecture and OS to know what binary installer to download. So don’t worry, it won’t accidentallyrm -rf /usr.Common or not, it’s still fucking awful and the people who promote this nonsense should be ashamed of themselves.
Don’t forget Pi-hole! It’s been the default install method since basically the beginning.
Thankfully, I’m using the docker version, which everyone should use.
Yah, when I read this, I was like, pretty sure pi-hole started this as a popular option. I dig it though, so I guess OP and I are not on the same page. (I do usually look over the bash scripts before running them piped to bash, though.
It should be uncommon
There is even a Windows (Powershell) example for Winutil:
Better than explaining how to make a .ps file trusted for execution (thankfully, one of the few executable file extensions that Windows doesn’t trust by default) but why not just use some basic .exe builder at this point?
Obligatory “they better make it a script that automatically creates a medium for silent Linux Mint installation, modifies the relevant BIOS settings and restarts” to prevent obvious snarky replies
Using a url that’s just some dude’s name makes this so much worse.
He’s reasonably trustworthy. I trust his utility more than Micro$oft but less than Linus Torvalds.
For rust at least, those are packaged in Debian and other distros too. I think rustup is in Debian Trixie too.
Don’t forget everyone’s favorite massgravel script