Downloading Nim

Today I saw this toot by user @hyperlinkyourheart regarding installing Nim:

Not a great experience so far though - choosenim is broken on Ubuntu 22.04 based systems ..

.. and that inspired this quick post. I would encourage the user posting that to bring up that issue on the Nim Forum, but here’s a quick stop-gap solution to install Nim using just curl and tar.

1. Copy and save the below script somewhere, let’s say as ~/scripts/download_nim.sh. Update the nim_install_dir variable in there to your choice. That is set to ${HOME}/nim by default.

   #!/usr/bin/env bash
   
   # Running this script will download and extract nim installation to ~/nim/${nim_version}.
   # To uninstall nim, just remove the ~/nim directory.
   
   set -euo pipefail # http://redsymbol.net/articles/unofficial-bash-strict-mode
   IFS=$'\n\t'
   
   nim_version="1.6.6"
   nim_archive_url="https://nim-lang.org/download/nim-${nim_version}-linux_x64.tar.xz"
   nim_install_dir="${HOME}/nim"
   
   tmp_dir="/tmp/${USER}"
   nim_download_dir="${tmp_dir}/nim-${nim_version}"
   
   nim_version_dir="${nim_install_dir}/${nim_version}"
   
   mkdir -p "${tmp_dir}"
   cd "${tmp_dir}" || exit
   echo "Downloading nim archive from ${nim_archive_url} .."
   curl -RLs "${nim_archive_url}" -o "nim.tar.xz"
   tar xf nim.tar.xz # Extracts to ${nim_download_dir}.
   
   if [[ -d "${nim_version_dir}" ]]
   then
       rm -rf "${nim_version_dir}"
   fi
   mkdir -p "${nim_version_dir}/doc"
   
   cd "${nim_version_dir}" || exit
   cp -fP "${nim_download_dir}"/doc/*.css ./doc/. # Required for 'nim doc ..' to work
   cp -rfP "${nim_download_dir}"/bin .
   cp -rfP "${nim_download_dir}"/lib .
   cp -rfP "${nim_download_dir}"/compiler . # Required for 'nimterop' package
   cp -rfP "${nim_download_dir}"/config .
   
   cd "${nim_install_dir}" || exit
   find . -name "bin" -type l -delete
   ln -fs "${nim_version_dir}"/bin ./bin
   
   echo "Finished downloading $("${nim_version_dir}"/bin/nim -v | head -n 1)"
   

   Code Snippet 1: Nim download script
2. Make the script an executable: chmod +x ~/scripts/download_nim.sh
3. Run ~/scripts/download_nim.sh.. This will download the nim compiler and its standard libraries (totaling to only 40MB!) to the path set in ${nim_install_dir}.
4. Make sure that the path in ${nim_install_dir} is added to your PATH.
5. Run nim --version to check the installation.

   Nim Compiler Version 1.6.6 [Linux: amd64]
   Compiled at 2022-05-05
   Copyright (c) 2006-2021 by Andreas Rumpf
   
   git hash: 0565a70eab02122ce278b98181c7d1170870865c
   active boot switches: -d:release
   

Now head over to https://nim-lang.org/learn.html to learn this awesome ❤️ language!