Setting up Raku with Rakubrew

Rakudobrew changed its name since last I looked

I was avoiding Rakudobrew for some now-forgotten technical reason. Probably couldn’t get a particular Perl 6 release to build. But I’m tired of one-off scripts or distribution packages that don’t quite match my expectations. What’s new in the Perl 6 language manager world?

For starters, names have changed. Perl 6 has been Raku for a little bit, and Rakudobrew is now Rakubrew.

I don’t recall enough about Rakudobrew to make a better or worse comparison. Let’s just install it and see how it works.

Unfortunately curl doesn’t like the rakubrew site.

$ curl https://rakubrew.org/install-on-perl.sh | sh
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--     0
curl: (60) SSL certificate problem: certificate has expired
More details here: https://curl.haxx.se/docs/sslcerts.html

curl failed to verify the legitimacy of the server and therefore could not
establish a secure connection to it. To learn more about this situation and
how to fix it, please visit the web page mentioned above.

Firefox thinks the site’s fine, though. I’ll download install-on-perl.sh and run it locally. Oh nice, shell initialization instructions specific to the shell I’m running.

$ sh ~/Downloads/install-on-perl.sh
Downloading rakubrew...
Installing rakubrew to /home/random/.rakubrew ...

Load rakubrew automatically in `zsh` by adding

  eval "$(/home/random/.rakubrew/bin/rakubrew init Zsh)"

to ~/.zshrc.
This can be easily done using:

  echo 'eval "$(/home/random/.rakubrew/bin/rakubrew init Zsh)"' >> ~/.zshrc

I do not yet have rakubrew on all my machines, but I do have nearly the same config everywhere thanks to an Org config file. The logic I want looks a little more like this.

~/.zshenv

export RAKUBREW_HOME=``$HOME/.rakubrew''

if [ -d "$RAKUBREW_HOME" ]; then
    eval "$($RAKUBREW_HOME/bin/rakubrew init Zsh)"
fi

Time to reload my shell and see if it worked.

$ rakubrew --help
Usage:
     rakubrew version          # or rakubrew current
     rakubrew versions         # or rakubrew list
     rakubrew global [version] # or rakubrew switch [<version>]
     rakubrew shell [--unset|<version>]
     rakubrew local [<version>]
     rakubrew nuke [<version>] # or rakubrew unregister [<version>]
     rakubrew rehash

     rakubrew available        # or rakubrew list-available
     rakubrew build [<backend>] [<tag>|<branch>|<sha-1>] [--configure-opts=<options>]
     rakubrew triple [<rakudo-version> [<nqp-version> [<moar-version>]]]
     rakubrew register <name> <path>
     rakubrew build-zef
     rakubrew download [<backend>] [<rakudo-version>]

     rakubrew exec <executable> [<executable-args>]
     rakubrew which <executable>
     rakubrew whence [--path] <executable>
     rakubrew mode [env|shim]
     rakubrew self-upgrade
     rakubrew init

     rakubrew test [<version>|all]

     rakubrew help [--verbose|<command>]
     rakubrew home
     rakubrew rakubrew-version

Apparently! Can I install a fresh version of Rakudo?

$ rakubrew download
Downloading https://rakudo.org/dl/rakudo/rakudo-moar-2020.05.1-01-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
Extracting
Done, moar-2020.05.1 installed

Yes indeed. Pretty quick, too. Looks like I no longer need to do a full build every time there’s a release. Nice.

Now make moar-2020.05.01 the default.

$ rakubrew switch moar-2020.05.1
Switching to moar-2020.05.1

And what can Raku tell me about itself? I’ll recycle my one-liner from a little bit ago.

$ raku -e 'say "Yo, World! This is $*PERL - specifically: { ($*PERL, $*VM, $*DISTRO).map({ $_.gist })}"'
Yo, World! This is Raku - specifically: Raku (6.d) moar (2020.05) manjaro (3.10.0.514.10.2.el.7.x.86._.64)

Now the real test. Can I install perl6-readline via zef for the Raku REPL?

$ zef install Readline
===> Searching for: Readline
===> Updating cpan mirror: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ugexe/Perl6-ecosystems/master/cpan1.json
===> Updating p6c mirror: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ugexe/Perl6-ecosystems/master/p6c1.json
===> Updated p6c mirror: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ugexe/Perl6-ecosystems/master/p6c1.json
===> Updated cpan mirror: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ugexe/Perl6-ecosystems/master/cpan1.json
===> Searching for missing dependencies: LibraryCheck
===> Testing: LibraryCheck:ver<0.0.9>:auth<github:jonathanstowe>:api<1.0>
===> Testing [OK] for LibraryCheck:ver<0.0.9>:auth<github:jonathanstowe>:api<1.0>
===> Testing: Readline:ver<0.1.5>:auth<github:drforr>
[Readline]
===> Testing [OK] for Readline:ver<0.1.5>:auth<github:drforr>
===> Installing: LibraryCheck:ver<0.0.9>:auth<github:jonathanstowe>:api<1.0>
===> Installing: Readline:ver<0.1.5>:auth<github:drforr>

Aw man. drforr sure has cast a long shadow. We’ll be missing him for a while.

And with that, I think I’ll sign off on this post. Everything I needed installed cleanly, including p6doc and a few other modules for puttering with the site.

Rakubrew worked!