Dolly — like apt, but for GitHub. Named after the sheep.

Most developer tools you actually use live on GitHub, not in your distro's package manager — or if they do, the distro version is two years stale. Dolly is a CLI that clones, builds, and installs tools straight from GitHub source, then keeps them up to date.

The name comes from Dolly the Finn-Dorset, the world's first cloned mammal (Scotland, 1996).

Quick start

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/c01aec80-dc9b-4580-bb39-eaebb3b6ee41

# From crates.io (recommended)
cargo install dolly-cli

# From source:
cargo install --git https://github.com/michal-pielka/dolly

Write a recipe at ~/.dolly/recipes/<repository>.toml:

[package]
owner = "junegunn"
repository = "fzf"
description = "A command-line fuzzy finder"

[build]
steps = ["go build ."]
output = "fzf"

Then:

dolly install junegunn/fzf

Dolly clones the repository into ~/.dolly/repositories/fzf/, runs go build ., and copies the resulting fzf binary to ~/.local/bin/fzf. Re-runs are idempotent.

Commands

Recipe format

Required: [package].owner, [package].repository, [build].steps, [build].output. Optional: [package].description.

[package]
owner = "BurntSushi"
repository = "ripgrep"

[build]
steps = ["cargo build --release"]
output = "target/release/rg"

steps runs each command via sh -c from the cloned repo's root, with full shell features (&&, pipes, env vars). output is the path to the built binary, relative to the repo root; its basename becomes the installed binary's filename. Unknown fields and malformed TOML fail loudly with a line number.

For multi-step builds, just list each command as its own entry — they're run sequentially, and the first failure aborts:

[package]
owner = "htop-dev"
repository = "htop"
description = "Interactive process viewer"

[build]
steps = [
  "./autogen.sh",
  "./configure",
  "make",
]
output = "htop"

Layout

~/.dolly/
  repositories/<repository>/    # cloned source trees
  recipes/<repository>.toml     # user-authored recipes
~/.local/bin/<binary>           # installed binaries (or $XDG_BIN_HOME)

The filesystem is the source of truth — there's no separate state file to drift out of sync.

TODO

Plans for future versions:

• Crash-safe updates — atomic binary swap with .bak, so a failed mid-update never leaves a broken tool on PATH.
• Better recipe-not-found UX — copy-pasteable starter template instead of a bare error.
• Auto-detection — recognise Cargo / Go / Make / CMake repos and generate a starter recipe automatically.
• Professional JS / Python tool handling — first-class install flows for non-compiled tools instead of treating everything like a built binary.
• Community registry — pull recipes from a shared GitHub repo so common tools work without hand-writing TOML.
• --quiet build mode — capture build output, replay only on failure.
• Shell completions via clap_complete.
• dolly doctor — check for stale clones, missing binaries, broken recipes.
• Rollback — restore a .bak binary from an earlier version.

License

MIT.