shards binary not reachable on MacOS

[n-rodriguez]

Bug Report

Hi there!

I use mise to setup local env and CI which basically :

1. download Crystal archive from Github
2. extract it in /Users/nicolas/.local/share/mise/installs/crystal/<version>
3. add /Users/nicolas/.local/share/mise/installs/crystal/<version>/bin in $PATH

In MacOs archive, bin/crystal is a wrapper script which finally exec embedded/bin/crystal but there is no equivalent for the shards command 😢

Hence CI job fails with sh: shards: command not found : https://github.com/jbox-web/netbox-extractor/actions/runs/23123014508/job/67160475404

Linux archive :

nicolas@MacBook-Pro-de-Nicolas:~/Downloads/crystal-1.19.1-1$ tree -L 2
.
├── bin
│   ├── crystal
│   └── shards
├── lib
│   └── crystal
└── share
    ├── bash-completion
    ├── crystal
    ├── fish
    ├── licenses
    ├── man
    └── zsh

MacOS archive :

nicolas@MacBook-Pro-de-Nicolas:~/Downloads/crystal-1.19.1-1 2$ tree -L 2
.
├── bin
│   └── crystal
├── embedded
│   ├── bin
│   │   ├── crystal
│   │   ├── pcre2-config
│   │   ├── pcre2grep
│   │   ├── pcre2test
│   │   └── shards
│   ├── include
│   ├── lib
│   └── share
├── etc
│   ├── completion.bash
│   ├── completion.fish
│   ├── completion.zsh
│   ├── gdb
│   ├── lldb
│   ├── msvc
│   └── win-ci
├── license-cache
├── LICENSES
│   └── libffi-LICENSE
├── samples
└── src

Thank you!

---

Add a 👍 reaction to issues you find important.

[straight-shoota]

I'm not sure why shards is in embedded/bin/shards. It would seem more reasonable to put it in bin/shards 🤔
But it seems it has always been like this.

It is actually quite astonishing that nobody has noticed this before... The package has 5k downloads per month. Apparently nobody uses it for shards? 🤷

[ysbaddaden]

Yeah, we put Shards into bin/embedded on macOS: https://github.com/crystal-lang/distribution-scripts/blob/master/omnibus/config/software/shards.rb#L120

The pkg's postinst script links both bin/crystal and embedded/bin/shards to the /usr/local folder: https://github.com/crystal-lang/distribution-scripts/blob/master/omnibus/package-scripts/crystal/postinst#L20-L21

But the tarball only has the crystal shell script in the bin folder. We should either put shards there directly, or at least link bin/shards to bin/embedded/shards (no need for shell script).

BTW: there's a bunch of files in the embedded folder that are never used (pcre2 executables, C headers, docs, ...).

[straight-shoota]

The postinst script is interesting. It could explain why this hasn't been noticed before, but it's actually only used in the .pkg - and almost nobody uses that. The tarball doesn't have a post install hook.