GDMan

A cross-platform CLI tool for managing versions of the Godot game engine.

Important

This is the legacy version of GDMan written in .Net. It will no longer be maintained. The alternative can be found at https://github.com/devklick/gdman.

Motivation

While working with Godot on Linux, I find it a chore having to download new versions, extract them, rename files and/or create a symbolic link, and having to update desktop launchers & config files that point to a previous version. I wanted a way to simply run a command and have all this happen behind the scenes.

And that's exactly what GDMan does!

Installing/Updating GDMan

GDMan can be installed either by manually carrying out a few simple steps or running one of the install scripts. The same process can be used for updating to the latest version.

Manual Install

You can manually install GDMan in a few steps:

• Download the latest release for your operating system
• Extract it to a folder of your choice, e.g. ~/gdman
• Update your path, adding your new folder to it. In the above example, we'd add ~/gdman to the PATH.
• Delete the downloaded zip file - it's no longer needed

Windows Install Script

Rather than running through the steps manually, you can run the PowerShell install script to install GDMan on Windows.

Run the following in a Admin PowerShell prompt:

. {iwr -useb https://raw.githubusercontent.com/devklick/GDMan.Net/master/install/install-windows.ps1} | iex;

Linux Install Script

You can run the following to use the install script for Linux:

wget -q https://raw.githubusercontent.com/devklick/GDMan.Net/master/install/install-unix.sh -O - | bash -s linux

The script will require the following tools to be available on the machine:

• curl
• jq
• wget
• unzip

MacOS Install Script

There's no bespoke script for installing on MacOS, however if you have the right tools available on your Mac, you can probably use the Linux install script and pass in osx as an argument:

wget -q https://raw.githubusercontent.com/devklick/GDMan.Net/master/install/install-unix.sh -O - | bash -s osx

The script will require the following tools to be available on the machine:

• curl
• jq
• wget
• unzip

Once you have GDMan installed, you should be able to invoke the following two commands from your terminal:

• gdman - for managing versions of Godot
• godot - to run the currently-active version of Godot

Note that the latter will not exist until you first install a version of Godot via GDMan
Note that on Windows, you may need to use godot.lnk rather than just godot

Installation Locations

If you use the install scripts, GDMan will be installed in:

• (Windows) - C:\Users\user\gdman
• (Linux / macOS) - /home/user/gdman

Note that each version of Godot you install install using GDMan can be found within the above directory, in a folder called versions.

Installing versions of Godot

To install a version of Godot, you run the install command.

Note

The shorthand command for install is i

Installing latest version

In most cases, you probably want to install the latest version of Godot, so you would pass in the --latest option.

gdman install --latest

Note

The shorthand option for --latest is -l

Installing an exact version of Godot

If you need more precision to install an exact version of godot, you can pass in the --version option with any valid semver value.

gdman install --version 4.2.2

Note

The shorthand option for --version is -v

Warning

GDMan does not support versions version of Godot < 4 for Linux. This is because published linux assets are considerably different between < 4 and >= 4. Hopefully this naming convention does not change too much in versions 5+ 🤞

Installing mono version

If you need to install the Mono version of Godot, you can do so by passing in the --flavour option with a value of mono.

gdman install --latest --flavour mono

Alternatively, you can set the GDMAN_TARGET_FLAVOUR environment variable to mono. Doing so means that Mono will be the default flavour whenever the install command runs, and to override this with the non-mono version you would override it with the standard option.

gdman install --latest --flavour standard

Note

The shorthand option for --flavour is -fl

Installing the correct version for your platform

In most cases, GDMan will be able to determine what platform you are running on (Windows, Linux or macOS), however you can also specify the platform via the --platform option.

gdman install --latest --platform mac

You can override the default behavior by setting the GDMAN_TARGET_PLATFORM environment variable with the desired platform. Then, whenever you run the install command, the value from the environment variable will be used, you wont have to specify the --platform option, and the app will not attempt to detect the platform you are running on.

Note

The shorthand option for --platform is -p

Installing the correct version for your system architecture

In most cases, GDMan will be able to determine what architecture your system uses (e.g x86, x64 etc). However, you can use the --architecture option to specify exactly which architecture to use.

gdman install --latest --architecture x86

You can override the default behavior by setting the GDMAN_TARGET_ARCHITECTURE environment variable with the desired architecture. Then, whenever you run the install command, the value from the environment variable will be used, you wont have to specify the --architecture option, and the app will not attempt to detect the system architecture you are running on.

Note

The shorthand option for --architecture is -a

List all installed versions

To view all of the versions of Godot that are installed on your system, run the list command.

gdman list

Note

The shorthand command for list is ls

Warning

This will only list version installed by GDMan

List active version

To see the version of Godot that is currently active, run the current command

gdman current

Note

The shorthand command for current is c

Uninstalling versions of Godot

You can uninstall versions by using the uninstall command.

gdman uninstall

Note

The shorthand command for uninstall is u

Uninstall unused versions

In most cases, you probably dont want to keep old versions lying around, and just want to remove all versions except the one that is currently active. To do so, you can specify the --unused property.

gdman uninstall --unused

Note

The shorthand command for --unused is -u

Uninstall specific version(s)

If you want to uninstall one or more specific versions, you can use the --version option to specify which versions should be uninstalled. Any valid semver version range is supported.

For example, uninstall all major version 3:

gdman uninstall --version 3

If you're uninstalling multiple versions using the --version option, you will need to include the --force | -f flag. Without this, the application will print the versions that have been found for uninstall but not uninstall them. This is only required when multiple versions have been identified matching the input options.

Note

The shorthand command for --version is -v

Other uninstall options

The uninstall command also optionally supports --platform, -architecture and --flavour, just like the install command does. If you do not specify these, the application will look for all versions matching the other specified options.