@ziglang/cli

This package serves as a wrapper for the Zig compiler CLI itself. It checks if Zig is installed system-wide, and otherwise detects the current platform, fetches the corresponding Zig binary, and installs it locally in your node_modules folder. This will be the typical scenario when setting up in a CI environment where Zig is not available.

If Zig is already installed, by default only a symlink to it will be created, no additional Zig package is installed. This will be the typical setup in development. If desired, the zig-install script can still be used to install a local version of Zig, regardless of any system-wide version.

Installing

npm i -D @ziglang/cli # or yarn or pnpm

Scripts

At the end of the npm install process, the postinstall.js script should run automatically, and install/symlink Zig (and other scripts) locally into your ./node_modules/.bin folder:

./node_modules/.bin/zig # the actual zig binary/symlink once installed
./node_modules/.bin/zig-install # installs zig locally
./node_modules/.bin/zig-reinstall # reinstalls zig locally
./node_modules/.bin/zig-uninstall # removes the local zig binary/symlink

The scripts can be manually executed if needed to fix any issue with the installation, either via npx (or pnpx or yarn), npm exec, or just referring to the script by name in your package.json scripts:

# examples for zig-install
./node_modules/.bin/zig-install
npx zig-install
npm exec zig-install

{
  "scripts": {
    "postinstall": "zig-install"
  }
}

Notes and TODOs

Priority:

• Handle versions, ideally it should be possible to track upstream Zig releases as tags, latest for stable releases, next to track master builds for example.
• Add native Windows support, it works on WSL2, Linux, and macOS. Should work well on most UNIX-like environments with curl, tar, and xz. Also tested deployment using Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, and Vercel (needed to manually yum install xz in the install command).

Explore:

• Provide a JS API for common zig CLI functionality (build, build-lib, fmt, run, test, translate-c, etc.)
• Compile Zig's std.zig functions into Wasm (export C-compatible functions), provide a JS API for the raw compiler functionality (tokenizer, parser)

Inspiration

• binary-install
• wasm-pack npm module

License

MIT