ERROR: Unable to identify distribution type (void)

Help & Support
1

I’m attempting to install Crystal on Void Linux, but always get the following error:

quin@Minix~$ curl -fsSL https://crystal-lang.org/install.sh | sudo bash

Password:

ERROR: Unable to identify distribution type (void). You may specify a repository with the environment variable DISTRO_REPO

ERROR: Please, report to Help & Support - Crystal Forum

I installed 1.19.1 by creating ~/crystal and copying everything in there manually, but that doesn’t work very cleanly for updates, so I’d like to do this the right way. What’s needed here?

Thanks!

2

The installer script is a convenience wrapper for installing the DEB and RPM packages from the OBS repository.
So it only works with package manager that support either of those packages.
This is explained on the install page: Linux - The Crystal Programming Language

I suppose we should improve the script’s error message to make that more clear.

Unfortunately, we cannot provide custom packages for all Linux distributions. You might want to upvote or contribute to Package request: Crystal Language · Issue #44881 · void-linux/void-packages · GitHub

We do provide generic Linux tarballs which should work on any Linux distribution: Tarball - The Crystal Programming Language
You can either use this build directly, or use it as bootstrap to rebuild the compiler yourself on your platform.

3
4

Thanks, makes perfect sense! I think the tarball is how I did this before, so I’ll just do that again. I also went and upvoted that issue :)

5

In case it helps anyone, I wrote this little bash script to update your crystal installation. It works on my system, but I take no responsibility if it breaks something somehow.


#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail
repo="crystal-lang/crystal"
target_dir="$HOME/crystal"
local_bin="$target_dir/bin/crystal"
latest_version=$(gh release view --repo "$repo" --json tagName --jq '.tagName')
url=$(gh release view --repo "$repo" --json assets --jq '.assets[] | select(.name | contains("linux-x86_64-bundled.tar.gz")) | .url')
if [ -x "$local_bin" ]; then
	current_version=$("$local_bin" --version | head -n1 | awk '{print $2}')
else
	current_version="none"
fi
if [ "$current_version" = "$latest_version" ]; then
	echo "You are already on the latest version ($current_version). Nothing to do."
	exit 0
fi
echo "A newer version is available. Upgrading to v${latest_version}..."
TMP_DIR=$(mktemp -d -t crystal-update-XXXXXXXX)
trap 'rm -rf "$TMP_DIR"' EXIT
ARCHIVE_NAME="crystal-${latest_version}-bundled.tar.gz"
curl -L "$url" -o "$TMP_DIR/$ARCHIVE_NAME"
mkdir -p "$TMP_DIR/extracted"
tar -xf "$TMP_DIR/$ARCHIVE_NAME" -C "$TMP_DIR/extracted" --strip-components=1
if [ -d "$target_dir" ]; then
	rm -rf "$target_dir"
fi
mv "$TMP_DIR/extracted" "$target_dir"
echo "Crystal successfully upgraded to v${latest_version}!"
6

Nice :+1:

I’d suggest installing the plain, non-bundled tarball, though.
The bundled variant is meant for use cases when you cannot install system packages.
It’s usually better for compatibility to use dependencies from your system package manager when you can.

7

Thanks, makes sense, and I’ve updated my script to do so. Possibly related, is there anything I can do about this warning every time I run crystal docs short of rebuilding the compiler myself? “Crystal built without LibXML2 support, documentation sanitization disabled”

8

I don’t think there’s a way to disable that message. It should be possible to add that, though.
This is still a bit under developed feature, and it’s not entirely clear where we’re heading.
The doc generator might be dropped from the portable tarball entirely in the future, and focus on its main purpose as a bootstrap compiler.

9

Fair enough, and the only reason I came across it was wanting an easily browsable version of the Crystal stdlib docs in offline HTML. pretty niche.