direnv-fetchurl - Man Page

direnv fetchurl <url> [<integrity-hash>]

This command downloads the given URL into a fixed disk location, based on the content of the retrieved file.

This has been introduced to avoid a dependency on curl or wget, while also promoting a more secure way to fetch data from the Internet. Use this instead of curl <url> | sh.

This command has two modes of operation:

1. Just pass the URL to discover the integrity hash.
2. Pass the URL and the integrity hash to get back the on-disk location.

Since the on-disk location is based on the hash, it also acts as a cache. One implication of this design is that URLs must be stable and always return the same content.

Downloaded files are marked as read-only and executable so it can also be used to fetch and execute static binaries.

<url>
   A HTTP URL that returns content on HTTP GET requests. 301 and other
   redirects are followed.

<integrity-hash>
   When passed, the integrity of the retrieved content will be validated
   against the given hash. The hash encoding is based on the SRI W3C
   specificiation (see  ⟨https://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/⟩ ).

direnv fetchurl outputs different content based on the argument.

If the integrity-hash is being passed, it will output the path to the on-disk location, if the retrieval was successful.

If only the url is being passed, it will output the hash as well as some human-readable instruction. If stdout is not a tty, only the hash will be displayed.

$ ./direnv fetchurl https://releases.nixos.org/nix/nix-2.3.7/install
Found hash: sha256-7Gxl5GzI9juc/U30Igh/pY+p6+gj5Waohfwql3jHIds=

Invoke fetchurl again with the hash as an argument to get the disk location:

  direnv fetchurl "https://releases.nixos.org/nix/nix-2.3.7/install" "sha256-7Gxl5GzI9juc/U30Igh/pY+p6+gj5Waohfwql3jHIds="
  #=> /home/zimbatm/.cache/direnv/cas/sha256-7Gxl5GzI9juc_U30Igh_pY+p6+gj5Waohfwql3jHIds=

XDG_CACHE_HOME
   This variable is used to select the on-disk location of the fetched URLs
   as $XDG_CACHE_HOME/direnv/cas. If XDG_CACHE_HOME is unset or empty,
   defaults to $HOME/.cache.

MIT licence - Copyright (C) 2019 @zimbatm and contributors

direnv-stdlib(1)

direnv(1), direnv-stdlib(1).