Introduction

Bunster is a shell compiler that converts shell scripts into secure, portable and static binaries. Unlike other tools (ie. shc), Bunster does not just wrap your script within a binary. It literally compiles them to standalone shell-independent programs.

Technically speaking, Bunster in fact is a shell-to-Go Transpiler that generates Go source out of your scripts. Then, optionally uses the Go Toolchain to compile the code to an executable.

Bunster aims to be compatible with bash as a starting move. You should expect your bash scripts to just work with bunster. Additional shells will be supported as soon as we release v1.

WARNING

This project is in its early stages of development. Only a subset of features are supported so far.

Vision

Bunster has a vision to make shell scripts feel like any modern programming language. With as many features as we could, without any bloating. anything that makes you feel happy when writing shell scripts. a feeling that shells usually don't provide, a feeling that languages like Go give you, we aim to:

• Improve error handling and messages, we want to help everyone write error-aware scripts. And when they fail, we want to give them clear, concise error messages.
• Introduce a module system that allows you to publish and consume scripts as libraries, with a builtin package manager.
• Add first-class support for a wide collection of builtin commands that just work out of the box. You don't need external programs to use them.
• Add first-class support for .env files. Allowing you to load variables from .env.
• Support static asset embedding. This feature allows you to embed a file's content to a variable at build time. (Go has one already)
• Support different shells and POSIX.

Get Started

Learn more about the usage of bunster.

Bunster VS Bash

We are not trying to compete with bash. Because unlike bash, bunster is not a shell. it is a programming language dedicated for scripting. bash has a scripting plan where you can write commands in scripts. but it's primary use case is interactively.

Bunster is trying to take all good things from bash. Add more features to them and make them available in a simple and familiar programming language.

Why do we have a separate documentation ?

We use the bash reference as a source of truth. and so you can. Becasue we have a promise to keep compatibility with bash, you are free to refer to that manual for feature documentation for features supported by bunster.

However, we decided to go with our own documentation so that we can focus on features that we support. Also, the bash reference keeps mentioning things that we have nothing to do with them. like interactive command line. Which is kind of confusing for our users.