Ubi Backend <Badge type="danger" text="deprecated" />

::: warning The ubi backend is deprecated. Please use the github backend instead.

The github backend offers several advantages over ubi including provenance verification, download progress reports, and fewer dependencies. To migrate, replace ubi:owner/repo with github:owner/repo in your configuration files. :::

You may install GitHub Releases and URL packages directly using ubi backend. ubi is directly compiled into the mise codebase so it does not need to be installed separately to be used.

ubi doesn't require plugins or even any configuration for each tool. What it does is try to deduce what the proper binary/tarball is from GitHub releases and downloads the right one. As long as the vendor uses a somewhat standard labeling scheme for their releases, ubi should be able to figure it out.

The code for this is inside of the mise repository at ./src/backend/ubi.rs.

Usage

The following installs the latest version of goreleaser and sets it as the active version on PATH:

$ mise use -g ubi:goreleaser/goreleaser
$ goreleaser --version
1.25.1

The version will be set in ~/.config/mise/config.toml with the following format:

[tools]
"ubi:goreleaser/goreleaser" = "latest"

Tool Options

The following tool-options are available for the ubi backend—these go in [tools] in mise.toml.

exe

The exe option allows you to specify the executable name in the archive. This is useful when the archive contains multiple executables.

If you get an error like could not find any files named cli in the downloaded zip file, you can use the exe option to specify the executable name:

[tools]
"ubi:cli/cli" = { version = "latest", exe = "gh" } # github's cli

rename_exe

The rename_exe option allows you to specify the name of the executable once it has been extracted.

use the rename_exe option to specify the target executable name:

[tools]
"ubi:cli/cli" = { version = "latest", exe = "gh", rename_exe = "github" } # github's cli

matching

Set a string to match against the release filename when there are multiple files for your OS/arch, i.e. "gnu", "musl", or "msvc". Note that this is only used when there is more than one matching release filename for your OS/arch. If only one release asset matches your OS/arch, then this will be ignored.

[tools]
"ubi:BurntSushi/ripgrep" = { version = "latest", matching = "musl" }

matching_regex

Set a regular expression string that will be matched against release filenames before matching against OS/arch. If the pattern yields a single match, that release will be selected. If no matches are found, this will result in an error.

[tools]
"ubi:shader-slang/slang" = { version = "latest", matching_regex = "\\d+\\.tar" }

provider

Set the provider type to use for fetching assets and release information. Either github or gitlab (default is github). Ensure the provider is set to the correct type if you use api_url as the type probably cannot be derived correctly from the URL.

[tools]
"ubi:gitlab-org/cli" = { version = "latest", exe = "glab", provider = "gitlab" }

api_url

Set the URL for the provider's API. This is useful when using a self-hosted instance.

[tools]
"ubi:acme/my-tool" = {
  version = "latest",
  provider = "gitlab",
  api_url = "https://gitlab.acme.com/api/v4",
}

extract_all

Set to true to extract all files in the tarball instead of just the "bin". Not compatible with exe nor rename_exe.

[tools]
"ubi:helix-editor/helix" = { version = "latest", extract_all = "true" }

bin_path

The directory in the tarball where the binary(s) are located. This is useful when the binary is not in the root of the tarball. This only makes sense when extract_all is set to true.

[tools]
"ubi:BurntSushi/ripgrep" = {
  version = "latest",
  extract_all = "true",
  bin_path = "target/release",
}

Binary path lookup order:

1. If bin_path is specified, use that directory
2. If extract_all is set to true, use the install path root
3. If bin_path is not set, look for a bin/ directory in the install path
4. If no bin/ directory exists, use the root of the extracted directory

tag_regex

Set a regex to filter out tags that don't match the regex. This is useful when a vendor has a bunch of releases for unrelated CLIs in the same repo. For example, cargo-bins/cargo-binstall has a bunch of releases for unrelated CLIs that are not cargo-binstall. This option can be used to filter out those releases.

[tools]
"ubi:cargo-bins/cargo-binstall" = { version = "latest", tag_regex = '^\d+\.' }

Self-hosted GitHub/GitLab

If you are using a self-hosted GitHub/GitLab instance, you can set the provider and api_url tool options. Additionally, you can set the MISE_GITHUB_ENTERPRISE_TOKEN or MISE_GITLAB_ENTERPRISE_TOKEN environment variable to authenticate with the API.

Supported Ubi Syntax

• GitHub shorthand for latest release version: ubi:goreleaser/goreleaser
• GitHub shorthand for specific release version: ubi:goreleaser/[email protected]
• URL syntax: ubi:https://github.com/goreleaser/goreleaser/releases/download/v1.16.2/goreleaser_Darwin_arm64.tar.gz

Troubleshooting ubi

ubi resolver can't find os/arch

Sometimes vendors use strange formats for their releases that ubi can't figure out, possibly for a specific os/arch combination. For example this recently happened in this ticket because a vendor used "mac" instead of the more common "macos" or "darwin" tags.

Try using ubi by itself to see if the issue is related to mise or ubi:

ubi -p jdx/mise
./bin/mise -v # yes this technically means you could do `mise use ubi:jdx/mise` though I don't know why you would

ubi picks the wrong tarball

Another issue is that a GitHub release may have a bunch of tarballs, some that don't contain the CLI you want, you can use the matching field in order to specify a string to match against the release.

mise use ubi:tamasfe/taplo[matching=full]
# or with ubi directly
ubi -p tamasfe/taplo -m full

ubi can't find the binary in the tarball

ubi assumes that the repo name is the same as the binary name, however that is often not the case. For example, BurntSushi/ripgrep gives us a binary named rg not ripgrep. In this case, you can specify the binary name with the exe field:

mise use ubi:BurntSushi/ripgrep[exe=rg]
# or with ubi directly
ubi -p BurntSushi/ripgrep -e rg

ubi uses weird versions

This issue is actually with mise and not with ubi. mise needs to be able to list the available versions of the tools so that "latest" points to whatever is the actual latest release of the CLI. What sometimes happens is vendors will have GitHub releases for unrelated things. For example, cargo-bins/cargo-binstall is the repo for cargo-binstall, however it has a bunch of releases for unrelated CLIs that are not cargo-binstall. We need to filter these out and that can be specified with the tag_regex tool option:

mise use 'ubi:cargo-bins/cargo-binstall[tag_regex=^\d+\.]'

Now when running mise ls-remote ubi:cargo-bins/cargo-binstall[tag_regex=^\d+\.] you should only see versions starting with a number. Note that this command is cached so you likely will need to run mise cache clear first.