infpi is a script for the University of Edinburgh's DICE system that makes installing programs from a tarball easier. The pi stands for 'program installer' rather than 'package manager' because it doesn't manage versioning, dependencies, uninstallation of programs, or anything really other than installation.
This command creates your ~/.local directory where per-user programs are stored, installs infpi to that directory and makes it executable.
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin && curl -L "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alecks/infpi/refs/heads/main/infpi.sh" -o ~/.local/bin/infpi && chmod +x ~/.local/bin/infpiDICE seems to have a setpath command, but I haven't used this.
Add the following to your ~/.brc if you use bash, the default shell for DICE, or ~/.zshrc if you use zsh:
PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATHThis allows you to call programs directly like my-program rather than ~/.local/bin/my-program.
Copy the URL of a package tarball and run infpi <url>. This will download the archive and extract it into the relevant directories.
For DICE, you are looking for an x86-64 or amd64 Linux tarball.
Here is an example which replaces DICE's default kitty terminal with the latest version:
infpi https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/releases/download/v0.39.0/kitty-0.39.0-x86_64.txzOr to download the latest version of neovim:
infpi https://github.com/neovim/neovim/releases/latest/download/nvim-linux-x86_64.tar.gzThe script expects the archive to have at least a bin directory or at least one executable in the root. In the case that there is a bin directory, all top-level directories in the archive (e.g. bin, lib, share) are copied into your ~/.local folder. If there isn't, and root executable(s) are found, they are moved to the ~/.local/bin directory and you will be asked about the rest.
If there are conflicts, infpi will ask you whether to overwrite all files (a), select some files interactively (s), or overwrite none (n).
If you wish to uninstall a program, infpi writes a log file to ~/.infpi/logs which you can use to see what was installed. You can then manually delete these files (but be careful not to delete anything shared by other programs).