Offer to / automatically install versions via channel selection #1218

IanButterworth · 2025-07-14T01:48:15Z

Makes it such that if you specify a channel which you don't have installed but is valid, it installs and launches it, with a message.

Works for all valid channel descriptors (including PRs).

% julia +badchannel
ERROR: Invalid Juliaup channel `badchannel`. Please run `juliaup list` to get a list of valid channels and versions.

Developed with Claude.

Note unrelated bugfixes that are included:

7f7e956 (#1218) - fix: add missing win32 handling in install_non_db_version
c6eafe3 (#1218) - fix win32 sorting panic

If this PR isn't a simple merge it might be worth separating those out as a bugfix.

Co-authored-by: github-actions[bot] <41898282+github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com>

Instead of using sorted_by() with an iterator chain, which can cause sorting panics with unstable comparison functions, this now: Collects all the database channels into a vector Extending it with the non-database channels Uses sort_by() to sort the entire collection in place This should resolve the i686 Windows CI failure because: sort_by() is more robust than sorted_by() for handling comparison functions that might not provide perfect total ordering All channels are sorted together rather than having separate sorted and unsorted sections The sorting happens on the complete dataset rather than being chained

IanButterworth · 2025-07-14T02:52:28Z

@davidanthoff I would prefer to be able to force push tidying these commits up into meaningful commits, but force push remains disallowed here. I think it should only be disabled for main and release branches.

IanButterworth · 2025-07-21T05:03:04Z

@StefanKarpinski FYI. I think you mentioned this idea somewhere.

davidanthoff · 2025-07-21T12:19:42Z

Cool, I really like this feature!

A few comments:

I think we should have a little more opt-in for this, i.e. I don't think it is ideal that launching Julia might start a pretty large download. I think ideally what we want is this: If Julia is started in such a way that the REPL will eventually appear, then there should be an interactive prompt "Do you want to install channel X (y/n)", if Julia is started in non-interactive mode we should have a flag like --force-juliaupor something like that. I think we could also add a config setting where people can switch to the kind of fully automatic mode that is the default in this PR right now.
So far the julialauncher binary does not contain any of the more complicated code that adds stuff etc. Instead it largely spawns juliaupwith secret command line flags that do things. The reasoning was twofold: 1) I wanted to keep the binary size of julialauncherdown (not sure how relevant that actually is), and 2) I have some ideas that would require juliaupto adopt tokio, and then we definitely don't want that in julialauncher, and I think mixing things would make that more difficult. So maybe there is a way that have the actual install step spawn juliaupand then wait until that finishes?

Implementation wise, it might be the best strategy to separate the interactive mode detection code from #1095 as a separate PR, merge that, and then my first point above could probably be implemented fairly quickly?

I hear you on the push restriction, but without it things happened in the past where I ended up literally spending hours trying to fix push/merge conflicts and I really don't want to deal with that :) The history here is a total mess in any case already, so there is no point in putting time into a nice history for a PR, it would be a diamond in a very rough sea ;)

IanButterworth · 2025-07-21T15:00:34Z

UI updated under my mouse.. accidental close.

@davidanthoff sounds good. I've made some changes along those lines

When a channel isn't installed, users now get prompted:

Question: The Julia channel 'nightly' is not installed. Would you like to install it?
  [y]es (default), [Y]es and remember, [n]o
Choice:

In non-interactive mode (no TTY), it defaults to "no" and shows the standard error message.

The config is 3-state:

juliaup config autoinstallchannels true - Always auto-install (no prompts)
juliaup config autoinstallchannels false - Never auto-install (no prompts)
juliaup config autoinstallchannels default - Reset to prompt behavior
Unset (default) - Prompt in interactive mode, fail in non-interactive mode

And the launcher now spawns juliaup add <channel> as a subprocess rather than calling installation functions directly.

davidanthoff · 2025-07-21T17:53:50Z

src/bin/julialauncher.rs

@@ -132,6 +134,119 @@ fn run_selfupdate(_config_file: &juliaup::config_file::JuliaupReadonlyConfigFile
    Ok(())
 }

+fn is_interactive() -> bool {
+    std::io::stdin().is_terminal() && std::io::stderr().is_terminal()


I think this is a necessary condition, but I think in addition we need to parse the command line arguments and figure out whether the Julia process will jump into the REPL or execute either a script/code snippet. I think generally that if someone runs julia +FOO main.jlwe should not show anything interactive, regardless of whether things are running in a terminal or not.

I think the PR I linked to above should have code that does that.

I couldn't find that check in the linked PR, but added this check based on julia args.

davidanthoff · 2025-07-21T17:57:02Z

src/bin/julialauncher.rs

+    std::io::stderr().flush()?;
+
+    let mut input = String::new();
+    std::io::stdin().read_line(&mut input)?;


We already use https://github.com/console-rs/dialoguer in the installer, we could use it here as well and have a consistent UI? But I'm not sure whether it actually has the kind of one-key-press option that I think would be ideal here.

I'm happy to merge as is if you want to keep it that way, just wanted to point to it :)

Oh that's nicer. I wasn't aware. Updated

davidanthoff

Cool, that was fast :)

The only thing that I think we need to address is the interactive detection, otherwise looks great.

davidanthoff · 2025-07-21T17:58:30Z

Oh, and I should say: Once we have that, we should do a similar thing for the message that a channel is out-of-date, it also should just show a prompt offering to update right away if we are in interactive mode!

This reverts commit 1e5527b.

This reverts commit 16d23c8.

This reverts commit c6eafe3.

This reverts commit 7cc284b.

IanButterworth · 2025-07-25T18:34:52Z

Bump @davidanthoff

Also,

Once we have that, we should do a similar thing for the message that a channel is out-of-date, it also should just show a prompt offering to update right away if we are in interactive mode!

I've been thinking about this and I don't think we should. I very often don't want to update because I just want to test what I have (and not hit more precompilation). I think adding a prompt in there might be more annoying than helpful.

KristofferC · 2025-07-25T19:11:52Z

Yes, please no prompts.

IanButterworth · 2025-08-15T10:01:37Z

@davidanthoff bump.

To try and help this along I'll see what copilot makes of it.

Copilot

Pull Request Overview

This PR implements automatic installation of Julia channels when they are requested via command line channel selection (e.g., julia +1.8.2). It adds a new configuration option autoinstallchannels that controls whether to automatically install missing but valid channels.

Adds autoinstallchannels configuration option with true/false/default values
Implements automatic installation of valid channels when requested via +channel syntax
Updates test suite to verify auto-installation behavior works correctly

Reviewed Changes

Copilot reviewed 6 out of 8 changed files in this pull request and generated 3 comments.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
src/command_config_autoinstall.rs	New module implementing the autoinstallchannels configuration command
src/config_file.rs	Adds auto_install_channels field to configuration structure with proper serialization
src/cli.rs	Adds AutoInstallChannels subcommand to the config CLI interface
src/lib.rs	Exports the new command_config_autoinstall module
src/operations.rs	Fixes missing win32 handling and improves error message for pull request downloads
tests/channel_selection.rs	Updates existing tests and adds new test for auto-installation functionality

_{Tip: Customize your code reviews with copilot-instructions.md. Create the file or learn how to get started.}

tests/channel_selection.rs

src/command_config_autoinstall.rs

Co-authored-by: Copilot <175728472+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com>

IanButterworth and others added 9 commits July 13, 2025 21:45

auto install versions via channel selection

ac23dd0

fix whitespace

5814a6e

Apply suggestions from code review

5be7284

Co-authored-by: github-actions[bot] <41898282+github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com>

fix

1e36ebd

fix windows

595b234

fix: add missing win32 handling in install_non_db_version

7f7e956

fix whitespace

16d23c8

fix

7cc284b

IanButterworth added 2 commits July 13, 2025 23:13

tryfix

1e5527b

Merge branch 'main' into ib/auto_install

856a87a

simplify approach. Add a prompt with setting to remember.

dfb71e7

IanButterworth closed this Jul 21, 2025

IanButterworth reopened this Jul 21, 2025

IanButterworth added 4 commits July 21, 2025 11:01

formatting

2452f74

Merge branch 'main' into ib/auto_install

361ac53

fix tests

bb0385d

formatting

e36885a

IanButterworth requested a review from davidanthoff July 21, 2025 16:09

davidanthoff reviewed Jul 21, 2025

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davidanthoff requested changes Jul 21, 2025

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IanButterworth added 3 commits July 21, 2025 19:38

extend interactive detection

71022c5

use dialoguer

f23934f

fix prompt

c6fe93a

IanButterworth requested a review from davidanthoff July 22, 2025 01:12

IanButterworth changed the title ~~Auto install versions via channel selection~~ Offer to / automatically install versions via channel selection Jul 22, 2025

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IanButterworth added 5 commits July 22, 2025 14:33

Revert "tryfix"

f67421f

This reverts commit 1e5527b.

Revert "fix whitespace"

34a1fe8

This reverts commit 16d23c8.

Revert "fix win32 sorting panic"

7fd8f03

This reverts commit c6eafe3.

Revert "fix"

0895381

This reverts commit 7cc284b.

Merge branch 'main' into ib/auto_install

2a82be8

IanButterworth requested a review from Copilot August 15, 2025 10:01

Copilot AI reviewed Aug 15, 2025

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Update src/command_config_autoinstall.rs

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Co-authored-by: Copilot <175728472+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com>

Offer to / automatically install versions via channel selection #1218

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IanButterworth commented Jul 14, 2025 •

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