Installing Pijul on Windows

Question
1

Not sure whether this should be under “Question” or “Documentation”. Anyway, I assume the documentation (and presumably the installation process) is clear for all OSes with the exception of Windows. The section on installing in the Pijul Manual does provide a link to “community-provided binaries” for Windows, but downloading and running the executable doesn’t appear to achieve a lot. So I guess the question is, do I just download the executable and add it to my path? If not, what should I do? Either way, it would be good for the relevant guidance to be included, either in the Pijul Manual or in the executable’s README.md on GitHub (with maybe a reference to that README in the Pijul Manual, as it is not visible when following the link). I take it there are some people out there who are using Pijul on Windows. If so, can someone fill in the blanks for what could (should?) be in the Pijul Manual between “Installing” and “Getting started” when the target is Windows?

Thanks =O)

2

The guidance I have received is:

To use pijul.exe released within this repo,

  1. You have to install MSVC runtime first;
  2. Then just download pijul.exe and place it into any PATH directory (I place it in cargo’s binary directory, BTW) ;
  3. Done! Now pijul is callable in cmd or PowerShell.

So the binary does not install Pijul, it is the Pijul executable. Perhaps the installation instructions could make that clear.

3

This is really poorly done, I agree. I’ve recently helped someone install it on windows and it was indeed really bad.

I’m super interested in testing the installation process, maybe providing an installer it that’s necessary. Also, there seems to be issues with the path to SSH keys, did you experience that as well?

4

@pmeunier I have to confess, having received the advice on how to use Pijul on Windows, I have gone no further than downloading the executable to date.

Unfortunately, much as I would like to, at the moment I cannot prioritise Pijul over the many other things that I have to get done. However, I will try and find some time within the next 2-3 weeks to try and get it running, and report back on my findings.

5

Have copied the Pijul executable to C:\Users\<user>\.cargo\bin (feels wrong though!) and, as expected, it is now callable. Small steps, but I will report back as I make (or don’t make!) progress.

6

@pmeunier Following the instructions at https://pijul.org/manual/keys.html, I tried to generate a key and got the following:

>pijul key generate <my-key-name>
error: The subcommand 'generate' wasn't recognized

USAGE:
    pijul identity [OPTIONS] <SUBCOMMAND>

For more information try --help

>

--help was no help!

7

@pmeunier Ran pijul init and pijul add Cargo.toml src\main.rs on a project, no problem. But when I tried pijul record I got the following:

It doesn't look like you have any identities configured!
Each author in Pijul is identified by a unique key to provide greater security & flexibility over names/emails.
To make sure humans (including you!) can easily identify these keys, we need a few personal details.
For more information see https://pijul.org/manual/keys.html

Clearly that is not in step with the latest version of the manual so started looking at pijul identity and found the following:

>pijul identity list
No identities found. Use `pijul identity new` to create one.
If you have created a key in the past, you may need to migrate via `pijul identity repair`

>

Am I right in assuming pijul identity new is the Windows equivalent of pijul key generate? Is the Windows version of Pijul out of date? It identifies as pijul 1.0.0-beta.6.

8

While waiting, I decided to give pijul identity new a go.

  1. Why is there a need for a unique identity name, a display name and a remote username? What is the purpose of each?
  2. If I am using Nest on pijul.org, should the remote URL be ssh.pijul.org?
  3. I was asked if I wanted to change the default SSH key. The default was “no”, so I went with that. Should I have said “yes”?

When I selected “no”, pijul stated:

Linking identity `<unique identity name>` with <remote username>@ssh.pijul.com
Unknown key for "ssh.pijul.com", fingerprint "...". Learn it (y/N)? y
Warning: Unable to automatically authenticate with server. Please make sure your SSH keys have been uploaded to the Nest.
For more information, please visit https://pijul.org/manual/the_nest/public_keys.html#ssh-public-keys

I visited the web page listed, but it didn’t really help. For the less technical Pijul users, a little more hand holding would be useful. At this point I gave up. Again!

9

I had the same question and have collected my findings regarding that in Identity / Key: What are the "name", "displayname" and "username"?.

10

@das-g Was just looking at that! Are you using Pijul on Windows?

11

No, on NixOS (a Linux distribution). But Pijul’s currently somewhat confusing nomenclature about identities and names is the same there, too.