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Parm

Install GitHub releases just like your favorite package manager

Details

External ID
46052530
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Parm
Website domain
github.com
Launched
Nov. 26, 2025
Cohort
—
Upvotes
7
Upvotes percentile
0.37882096069869
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Description

Hi all, I built a CLI tool that allows you to seamlessly install software from GitHub release assets, similar to how your system's package manager installs software.It works by exploiting common patterns among GitHub releases across different open-source software such as naming conventions and file layouts to fetch proper release assets for your system and then downloading the proper asset onto your machine via the GitHub API. Parm will then extract the files, find the proper binaries, and then add them to your PATH. Parm can also check for updates and uninstall software, and otherwise manages the entire lifecycle of all software installed by Parm.Parm is not meant to replace your system's package manager. It is instead meant as an alternative method to install prebuilt software off of GitHub in a more centralized and simpler way.It's currently in a pre-release stage, and there's a lot of features I want to add. I'm currently working (very slowly) on some new features, so if this sounds interesting to you, check it out! It's completely free and open-source and is currently released for Linux/macOS. I would appreciate any feedback.Link: https://github.com/yhoundz/parm

Enrichment

Theme
git and repository workflow tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Dev tools
Audience
Developer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
package manager for github releases
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Yes This is a straightforward CLI tool in Go or Python that parses GitHub Release APIs, matches OS/architecture asset patterns using regex heuristics, downloads the archive, and extracts executables to the system path.

Discussion

2 comments analyzed.

Concerns raised: Manual GitHub release visits required without list commands, Unsupported self-installation with Parm

Feature requests: Command to list releases for a repo, Command to list release info, Interactive menu to pick release and asset from list, Shell autocompletion for asset names and release tags

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 126 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #78 of 127 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 19 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.