To wrap up the 2022, here's my final release of th...

# feed

[Big Chungus]

To wrap up the 2022, here's my final release of the year - introducing ktx@0.0.1 🎉

ktx is npx built for kotlin ecosystem. Currently it only supports running & installing kotlin scripts, but I do plan to add maven jar support in the future. 0.0.1 is the first developer preview release, so I'd very much appreciate any feedback I could get about its API, usage or just general usefulness.

Here's a one-liner to get it onto your unix system

curl <https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mpetuska/ktx/master/scripts/install.sh> | bash

[mbonnin]

Would be nice to have an usage example on the readme

[mbonnin]

On mobile right now but looking forward to testing this. I've been looking for something like that for a long time

[Big Chungus]

Good idea! Let me know if you have any useful kotlin scripts to use for such examples

[Big Chungus]

Otherwise I'll mock up some sample scripts myself

[mbonnin]

Nothing at the top of my head. Simple sample script is 👍👍

[Big Chungus]

Ah, then there's nothing special. As mentioned in the usage section it's as simple as ktx run <https://server.io/url/to/script.kts|https://server.io/url/to/script.kts> (doesn't even need to have .kts extension as long as content is kotlin script)

[Big Chungus]

Caching is rudimentary at the moment and ignores etags

[mbonnin]

A few more feedbacks:
• on my M1 mac + zsh, ktx is installed to /Users/mbonnin/.local/share/ktx/ but /Users/mbonnin/.ktx/ is sourced
• I'm guessing it requires a JVM installed, right?

[mbonnin]

Looking further, what about something that can run any maven dependency as long as it's a jar with a main class?

[mbonnin]

# default uses latest version
ktx run com.example:my-cli
# version can be specified explicitely
ktx run com.example:my-cli:1.0

[Big Chungus]

Running jars is the next thing on my todo list. Should land this month.

[mbonnin]

I guess the hard part is the dependency resolution, right?

[mbonnin]

Not sure what Kotlin scripting uses these days, maybe that can be reused

[Big Chungus]

A few more feedbacks:

on my M1 mac + zsh, ktx is installed to /Users/mbonnin/.local/share/ktx/ but /Users/mbonnin/.ktx/ is sourced

I'm guessing it requires a JVM installed, right?

That's expected. I'm trying to keep ktx itself and it's state separate. However the layout is not final yet, still experimenting with it. Also jvm is the only prerequisite, should probably mention it in the readme 😀

[Big Chungus]

Re: jars
It's actually super easy, barely an inconvenience 😂
I'm planning to generate a simple script that declares a dependency on the jar and invokes its main method. After that kotlin script engine will resolve the dependencies as per usual

[mbonnin]

Right, that works too!

[mbonnin]

So looks like kotlin is a dependency too? In addition to a JVM?

[mbonnin]

Or do you install kotlin if not found?

[Big Chungus]

Nope, it uses embedded scripting

[Big Chungus]

So just the jvm

[mbonnin]

Ah I see

[mbonnin]

"installed part of ktx"

[Big Chungus]

Btw, what do you mean by "`/Users/mbonnin/.ktx/` is sourced"? It should source /Users/mbonnin/.local/share/ktx/.ktxrc

[mbonnin]

$ cat /Users/mbonnin/.local/share/ktx/.ktxrc
#!/usr/bin/env bash

if [[ -z "$KTX_HOME" ]]; then
  KTX_HOME="$HOME/.ktx"
  PATH="$KTX_HOME/bin:$PATH"
fi%

[Big Chungus]

So it does source the right file. .ktxrc just appends to path

[mbonnin]

Yea right but KTX_HOME is wrong

[mbonnin]

(inside the sourced file)

[mbonnin]

I was expecting

if [[ -z "$KTX_HOME" ]]; then
  KTX_HOME="$HOME/.local/share/ktx"
  PATH="$KTX_HOME/bin:$PATH"
fi%

[mbonnin]

(or somthing at ~/.ktx but somehow I don't have it there?)

[mbonnin]

$ ls ~/.ktx
ls: /Users/mbonnin/.ktx: No such file or directory

[Big Chungus]

And that's fine, it gets created as needed

[Big Chungus]

So on the first run/install of a script

[Big Chungus]

Let me know if that's not the case on osx

[mbonnin]

first run/install of a script

Thing is I can't run anything because ktx is not in my PATH by default

[mbonnin]

I had to do export PATH=$HOME/.local/share/ktx/bin:$PATH manually

[Big Chungus]

Ah, that's probably because you don't have ~/.local/bin on your path (ktx is symlinked to that dir)

[Big Chungus]

Unix paths are hard...

[Big Chungus]

I guess just adding ktx bin to path directly should be more reliable since we're sourcing shit anyways

[mbonnin]

I have it:

$ ls -al ~/.local/bin/ktx
lrwxr-xr-x  1 mbonnin  staff  39 Jan  2 13:47 /Users/mbonnin/.local/bin/ktx -> /Users/mbonnin/.local/share/ktx/bin/ktx

[mbonnin]

But it's not in my PATH (for some reason 🤷 )

[mbonnin]

I guess just adding ktx bin to path directly should be more reliable since we're sourcing shit anyways

+1. I don't think you can expect anything besides /usr/bin to be in $PATH

[Big Chungus]

Anyways that's exactly why I wanted someone besides me to tinker with it - lots of good feedback to improve upon! Plus I'm testing on linux so some osx tinkering was useful too!

[CLOVIS]

Any benefits compared to something like kscript ?

[Big Chungus]

It's purpose is entirely different. Kscript is kotlin script runner, whereas ktx is script (and soon executable jar) manager. It's purpose is to make it trivial to install or just executive arbitrary kotlin scripts/jars off the web, just like npx for js.

[Big Chungus]

Although there's some overlap since ktx is also able to execute local scripts

[mbonnin]

kscript is also able to run download and cache remote scripts: https://github.com/kscripting/kscript#url-usage

[mbonnin]

But not arbitrary jars

[CLOVIS]

Running arbitrary JARs is just a wget +`java -jar` call, though

[mbonnin]

Dependency resolution is the hard ™️ thing

[CLOVIS]

Ah, does KTX have a solution to that? That's interesting

[mbonnin]

If jars are fat jars, it's fine but other times it's not

[CLOVIS]

I tried using Kscript with Maven dependencies but it didn't work well

[mbonnin]

It's working okay-ish these days as long as you use maven publications

[mbonnin]

The catch is more and more publication are actually Gradle publications that rely on a .module file

[Big Chungus]

Jar support is in the works, should land by the end of the week

[mbonnin]

So for all multiplatform stuff, you have to append -jvm for an example

[CLOVIS]

I can't run kscript anyway

[mbonnin]

(I'm actually talking about the resolver used by *.main.kts , i.e. first party resolver. Maybe kscript is a bit different)

[mbonnin]

@CLOVIS use *.main.kts , it's working really well for me

[CLOVIS]

I'll try that, thanks

[Big Chungus]

Another differentiating factor for ktx is that it's able to "install" remote jars and scripts that are then usable like any other cli command from the terminal.

E.g.

ktx install <https://host.com/my-script.main.kts|https://host.com/my-script.main.kts>

my-script arg1 arg2 #just works

[Big Chungus]

https://kotlinlang.slack.com/archives/C0BJ0GTE2/p1673400313715129
No jar support as promised, but it delivers the next best thing - maven package support. Although I'm not sure how useful direct jar execution support would be? Curious to hear your thoughts and use-cases for that.