Any plans to support binary releases for `controller-gen`?

[jaypipes]

First, want to say thanks for the great work on the controller-tools repo. It's generally awesome. :)

I work on a project (github.com/aws/aws-controllers-k8s) that makes heavy use of controller-gen to augment our own code generation. However, because there are no binary releases of controller-gen we've seen one issue crop up.

Since the only way to use the controller-gen tool is to "install" it with go get, if a contributor to our project doesn't have controller-tools locally and they run go get to install it, that invariably ends up modifying the go.mod/sum file in our source repository. These are // indirect entries in the go.mod but still, it's kind of annoying to have to tell contributors to undo the changes to their go.mod/sum files due to this.

I was wondering if there are any plans to produce binary artifacts for the controller-gen tool? This would certainly make our lives a bit easier on the downstream consumer side of things.

If not binary artifacts, perhaps publishing Docker images containing pre-built controller-gen binaries?

[dhellmann]

In metal3 we ended up creating a script to install controller-gen so we could create a temporary directory, run go mod init there, then run go get. https://github.com/metal3-io/baremetal-operator/blob/master/hack/install-controller-gen.sh

We would happily consume binary releases, too, if they existed.

[jaypipes]

In metal3 we ended up creating a script to install controller-gen so we could create a temporary directory, run go mod init there, then run go get. https://github.com/metal3-io/baremetal-operator/blob/master/hack/install-controller-gen.sh

We would happily consume binary releases, too, if they existed.

Sweet. Consider that script copied ;)

Thanks @dhellmann!

[dhellmann]

In metal3 we ended up creating a script to install controller-gen so we could create a temporary directory, run go mod init there, then run go get. https://github.com/metal3-io/baremetal-operator/blob/master/hack/install-controller-gen.sh
We would happily consume binary releases, too, if they existed.

Sweet. Consider that script copied ;)

Thanks @dhellmann!

To give credit where due, I'm pretty sure that the approach in the script actually came from the commands kubebuilder put in the Makefile it generated for us. We moved it to a script as part of hacking it to ensure it always installed exactly the version we wanted, without overwriting a version the user may have already had in $GOBIN.

[estroz]

Bumping this. Perhaps tarring all 3 binaries by platform so the release artifact count doesn't blow up, ex.

$ tar --list -f controller-tools_linux_amd64.tar.gz
controller-gen
helpgen
type-scaffold

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[bhiravabhatla]

/remove-lifecycle stale

[jgallucci32]

Another reason for having this feature is the use of controller-tools behind a company firewall which rate limits/throttles downloads to Github and other sources. It sometimes can take an hour to get the controller tools loaded on a box for doing basic development. We started pre-packaging it into containers so we only have to download once; we're also looking at deploying a Go Proxy to cache them as well. Other methods involve creating a vendor directory on a local git repo and then installing the controller binary. These all seem like tedious workarounds to not having an offline installer binary.

[lbscorpio]

Vote +1, the binary releases can save more time than go get.

[fejta-bot]

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