cheat/INSTALLING.md

Installing

cheat has no runtime dependencies. As such, installing it is generally straightforward. There are a few methods available:

Install manually

Unix-like

On Unix-like systems, you may simply paste the following snippet into your terminal:

cd /tmp \
  && wget https://github.com/cheat/cheat/releases/download/4.2.5/cheat-linux-amd64.gz \
  && gunzip cheat-linux-amd64.gz \
  && chmod +x cheat-linux-amd64 \
  && sudo mv cheat-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/cheat

You may need to need to change the version number (4.2.5) and the archive (cheat-linux-amd64.gz) depending on your platform.

See the releases page for a list of supported platforms.

Windows

TODO: community support is requested here. Please open a PR if you'd like to contribute installation instructions for Windows.

Install via go install

If you have go version >=1.17 available on your PATH, you can install cheat via go install:

go install github.com/cheat/cheat/cmd/cheat@latest

Install via package manager

Several community-maintained packages are also available:

Package manager	Installing
brew	brew install cheat
docker	alias cheat='docker run --rm bannmann/docker-cheat'
nix	nix-env --install cheat
snap	snap install cheat

Configuring

Three things must be done before you can use cheat:

1. A config file must be generated
2. cheatpaths must be configured
3. Community cheatsheets must be downloaded

On first run, cheat will run an installer that will do all of the above automatically. After the installer is complete, it is strongly advised that you view the configuration file that was generated, as you may want to change some of its default values (to enable colorization, change the paginator, etc).

conf.yml

cheat is configured by a YAML file that will be auto-generated on first run.

By default, the config file is assumed to exist on an XDG-compliant configuration path like ~/.config/cheat/conf.yml. If you would like to store it elsewhere, you may export a CHEAT_CONFIG_PATH environment variable that specifies its path:

export CHEAT_CONFIG_PATH="~/.dotfiles/cheat/conf.yml"