JLLPrefixes

Collect, symlink and copy around prefixes of JLL packages! This package makes it easy to use prefixes of JLL packages outside of Julia, either by symlinking or copying them to a stable prefix.

Example:

using JLLPrefixes

# Download all of FFMPEG_jll, then copy all the files into the ~/local/ffmpeg_prefix` folder
prefix = expanduser("~/local/ffmpeg_prefix")
artifact_paths = collect_artifact_paths(["FFMPEG_jll"])
deploy_artifact_paths(prefix, artifact_paths)
run(`$(joinpath(prefix, "bin", "ffmpeg")) -version`)

The files are now available to be used outside of Julia! No more LD_LIBRARY_PATH shenanigans! Note that some tools (such as git) may still need some help finding their data files, and so you may still need to define some environment variables.

Deployment strategies

By default, JLLPrefixes will attempt to use hardlink() to hit the sweet spot of performance (hardlinking is faster than copying) and compatibility (executables with RPATHs and other relative paths embedded within them don't play well with symlinks). If you are unable to use hardlinks (e.g. your source and destination are located on different filesystems/devices) it will silently fall back to using copy(). If you require high performance and don't care about compatibility with executables with embedded relative paths, you can manually request deploy_artifact_paths() to use symlink() by passing :symlink as the strategy keyword argument.