approot

Build, install and run standard Linux applications and libraries as a non-admin user. sudo make install not required.

License and Warranty

See the LICENSE file that is included with this project

Warning

This project is considered EXPERIMENTAL and ALPHA Bugs, errors, unexpected constraints are expected. Use at your own risk. See the LICENSE file for more information

Installation

cd
git clone https://github.com/angrave/approot

printf "\n. ${HOME}/approot/approot_functions\n" >> ~/.bashrc

To use approot immediately either start a new shell or source the functions-

. approot/approot_functions  (that lonely dot is important)

Then create a directory where applications will be installed

mkdir ~/localapps
approot_init ~/localapps

To use

approot_activate ~/localapps

This will set $APPROOT, $PATH, LIBDIR and a whole load of other environment variables. Most users will always want to always use this directory for all their applications, so you can set it as the default application root in your .bashrc file

printf "\n. approot_activate ${HOME}/localapps\n" >> ~/.bashrc 

To stop using a directory either approot_activate another-directory or use

approot_deactivate

The latter will unset a whole load of environment variables and remove the current $APPROOT_PATH from your $PATH

Advanced: Customizing an approot environment

You can customize your approot environment by adding commands to the following files

#Extra commands to run when activating the application root -
${APPROOT}/share/approot_activate_custom 
#Extra commands to run when deactivating the current application root
${APPROOT}/share/approot_deactivate_custom 

For example, we can set make to compile in parallel or configure the download directory to be inside /tmp

#approot_activate_custom

export APPROOT_BUILD="/tmp/${USER}_appbuild"
mkdir -p -m700 "${APPROOT_BUILD}" 2>/dev/null
export MAKEFLAGS="-j4"

Building Applications

See the example scripts inside the example_builds/ directory

# We will the buildsource.sh script to download, compile and install a standard linux application
# buildsource.sh assumes the project has a  ./configure step.

cd ~/approot/example_builds/

# Or whatever directory you like to install your packages in
approot_activate ~/local

./buildsource.sh https://cloud.r-project.org/src/base/R-3 R 3.5.1 --without-man --with-readline=no
R -e 'install.packages("rstan",repos="http://cran.us.r-project.org")'

If I wanted readline and curl support -
./buildsource.sh https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/ncurses ncurses 6.1 --without-man
./buildsource.sh https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline readline 7.0 --without-man
./buildsource.sh https://curl.haxx.se/download curl 7.61.1 --without-man

Use the source!

This project is big in utility but small in size. To find out more please read the source! For example approot_init approot_activate are just shell functions defined inside approot_functions