Install ubi with Homebrew, winget

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• ubi

Project history

The official repository describes ubi as the Universal Binary Installer. Its release page shows a 0.x project with signed tags, many platform-specific release assets, and continuing changes around asset selection, platform matching, Android support, libc matching, private-repository downloads, and supply-chain safety.

The project is maintained by Dave Rolsky under the houseabsolute namespace and is distributed under Apache-2.0 OR MIT in the batch input. Its own releases are themselves a demonstration of the problem it solves: the v0.9.0 release publishes many per-platform archives and checksum assets.

Adoption history

ubi is adopted in package-nerd workflows where users want a lightweight installer for GitHub-release binaries without writing a custom curl, tar, and grep script for each tool. The batch input lists Homebrew and winget availability, reflecting its cross-platform installer niche.

Release notes show the project responding to real packaging edge cases: asset names that contain misleading numbers, Android targets, musl versus glibc Linux assets, private repositories, and minimum release age to reduce supply-chain risk.

How it is used

ubi is used to pick a matching release artifact for the current platform, download it, and install the contained binary. Its package-nerd use case is bootstrapping CLI tools from upstream release assets when a native package does not exist or when the user wants upstream's current binary.

The v0.9.0 release added a --min-age-days flag to consider only releases at least a specified age, explicitly framed by the project as useful for mitigating supply-chain attacks.

Why package nerds care

ubi matters because GitHub Releases became an unofficial binary distribution layer for many small CLIs. A generic installer for those releases sits between full package managers and one-off install scripts.

For Homebrew users, the amusing recursion is that a package manager can install ubi, and ubi can then install tools that are not packaged or are wanted directly from upstream release artifacts.

Timeline

• 2024-2026: The visible release history is in the 0.x series, with repeated changes around release-asset matching and platform support.
• 2026: v0.9.0 is released with --min-age-days for release-age filtering.

Related projects

• GitHub Releases are the primary ecosystem surface for ubi's installer model.
• Homebrew and winget provide native package-manager distribution for ubi itself according to the batch input.

Sources

• https://github.com/houseabsolute/ubi identifies the project as The Universal Binary Installer.
• https://github.com/houseabsolute/ubi/releases documents release history, platform assets, asset-matching changes, private-repository handling, Android support, libc matching, and the --min-age-days supply-chain feature.
• source_facts.package-manager identifies Homebrew and winget availability.