Installation & update

The most straightforward way of installing freckles is to download the executable of the command you need:

• Linux / Windows subsystem for Linux (pure Windows not supported yet)
  • freckles
• Mac OS X
  • freckles

After download, place the executable somewhere in your path (I usually use $HOME/.local/bin -- but you might have to add that to your $PATH environment variable) and make it executable:

mv ~/Downloads/freckles ~/.local/bin
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/freckles

If you intend to also use the frecklecute application (and you probably want to), also link the file to that name (as the binary contains both the freckles and frecklecute applications):

ln -s freckles ~/.local/bin/frecklecute

A good way of bootstrapping freckles on vanilla boxes is by utilizing freck, the official freckles bootstrap script.

For how it exactly works, and why you should or should not trust it, head over to it's homepage. This method of bootstrapping is the easiest, and fricktionlessest. One of the main reasons for creating freckles was that I wanted a way to setup a new box (physical or virtual) by executing only one (easy-ish to remember) line in a terminal. freck provides that functionality.

Commands

Using curl:

curl https://freckles.sh | bash

Using wget:

wget -O - https://freckles.sh | bash

This will download the appropriate binary into $HOME/.local/share/freckles/bin. You can configure the install process with environment variables, more details can be found in the freck documentation.

If you have security concerns using this, please visit the security section.

What does this do?

Check out the freck README file.

There will be more details on this later, for now, just quickly:

# for python >= 3.4
python -m venv ~/.virtualenvs/freckles
source . ~/.virtualenvs/freckles/bin/activate
pip install freckles-cli

freckles --help

Just re-download the file you downloaded earlier, and replace the older binary. That's all.

Bootstrap script

If you have used the bootstrap script to install freckles, you can also use it for updating. Just add the UPDATE=true environment variable:

Using curl:

curl https://freckles.sh | UPDATE=true bash

Using wget:

wget -O - https://freckles.sh | UPDATE=true bash