What's the best CLI installation experience you've ever seen?

Windows Portable Applications... copy them into a folder, and run them. No installation required.

Because there isn't a stable system interface table in Linux (i.e. INT 21, AH=9 prints a $ delimited string in MS-DOS, and has since the 1980s), you can't just run an executable.

The closest you're likely to get is Justine's APE - Actually Portable Executable[1] to get something you can distribute and just run.

[1] https://justine.lol/ape.html

This probably isn't in the spirit of what you're asking but watching my Dad install Red Hat using Anaconda in the late 90s was pretty sweet. I seem to recall Debian having a similar TUI that I used to load it on my long-obsolete iMac G3 back in college. Good times.

can't beat homebrew imo

curl https://whatever.it.is | bash

Static binary. There is no installation. Compile, move to folder, set permmissions, done.

Outside of that, NetBSD. Download install kernel, write to media, boot, compile an entire system.

FreeBSD is also good.

Pet peeve: I see lots of system projects that look very cool but only boot from qemu.

Anything packaged for Debian. apt install whatever.

dnf

pnpm. Really fast, and user-friendly. Too bad it's not backwards-compatible with npm. I use it for all of my Node.js projects, but I sadly have to use npm when jumping into the frontend of project I volunteer on.

Another one would be Nala, I used this as my day-to-day apt frontend before I switched to Fedora. It makes the UX much more better than apt for daily usage.

One-line installations: I usually don't like running multiple commands for installing a CLI tool. curl/wget the setup file and execute it. Single command -> single step -> no friction.

The best installation experience is no installation.

My favorite: Single binary Hashicorp Nomad, the same binary for client and server! Runs without sudo, straight out of /tmp.

sudo nixos-rebuild --flake .#nixos-linux switch

The symfony-cli is pretty sweet to setup new projects and add dependencies.

make -j5

sudo make install

also it's really great when `sudo make uninstall` works

./configure && make && sudo make install