Use Julia's artifact system to ship pre-built system images to users.

module MyCustomImages

using SystemImageLoader

const install = @ArtifactInstaller(
    artifact"MyImage",
)
const config = ArtifactConfig(install)

end

Provide an Artifacts.toml file in your MyCustomImages.jl package that lists the artifact MyImage. The .tar.gz must have the following structure:

/artifacts
  # All the Julia artifacts required by the system image.
/system-images
  # The system image with the name `ImageOne`.

This is a minimal Julia depot folder, with everything not required removed. You can leave other content in the tarball if you want but this will waste space so best practise is to remove the extra folders.

Users of your package can then perform the following steps to install and use your custom system image:

(@v1.7) pkg> add https://github.com/USER_NAME/MyCustomImages.jl

julia> using MyCustomImages

julia> MyCustomImages.install()

install() will start an interactive prompt to allow the user to pick which images (if you have several) that they would like to install.

Once installed custom juliaup channels will be automatically created for each available system image.

Starting julia with the newly added channel will look like the following:

$ julia +1.7.3/MyCustomImages/MyImage

where 1.7.3 would be whatever Julia version you installed MyCustomImages with.

If the channel name is too long for your liking then you can alias it to another shorter channel name with juliaup like so:

$ juliaup link MyImage julia +1.7.3/MyCustomImages/MyImage

which can then be started with just julia +MyImage.

• system-image-loader provides the binary loader used to locate depot and image file paths for a given custom channel.

• CuratedSystemImages.jl provides a selection of pre-built system images as Julia artifacts that can be installed and used as custom channels.

• curated-system-images is the builder repository for the above Julia package and is where all the project manifests are located for generating specific system image bundles.