Am in the only one who cringes at install instructions that require piping some curl output into bash?
Am in the only one who cringes at install instructions that require piping some curl output into bash?
curl https://some-url/ | sh
I see this all over the place nowadays, even in communities that, I would think, should be security conscious. How is that safe? What's stopping the downloaded script from wiping my home directory? If you use this, how can you feel comfortable?
I understand that we have the same problems with the installed application, even if it was downloaded and installed manually. But I feel the bar for making a mistake in a shell script is much lower than in whatever language the main application is written. Don't we have something better than "sh" for this? Something with less power to do harm?
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I always try to avoid these, unless the application I'm installing has it's own package management functionality, like Rustup or Nix. Everything else should be handled by the system package manager.
Use containers for installing things.
It is sandboxed and controllable by you
Ironically, it is rustup that triggered me with this most recently... https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install