Distribution flavors

The camel CLI ships in three flavors: slim, regular, and full. Each flavor is a preset feature set selected by a flavor-* marker in crates/camel-cli/Cargo.toml.

Flavor table

Each asset has a matching .tar.gz.sha256 sidecar that stores the tarball checksum.

The bodies are chained. Each flavor includes the marker of the flavor below it. slim ⊆ regular ⊆ full is structural, not tested-in. camel lint is part of the base set, so it works in every flavor.

Regular excludes only four items, each by a named principle:

• kafka: a C dependency (librdkafka) that cannot build for musl targets.
• surrealdb: BUSL-1.1, the only non-OSI license in the dependency graph.
• exec: arbitrary host-binary execution, rejected by ADR-0037.
• containers: an infrastructure-daemon client (camel-function and camel-component-container as one feature).

Docker tag map

The base image is a function of the toolchain. Musl flavors ship on scratch. The gnu flavor ships on distroless.

Discontinued tags

The -alpine and -gnu tags are discontinued. They are never pushed again. Existing tags freeze at their last content. Pulls keep working. Nothing 404s. Use the -slim and -full families instead.

DIY alpine wrapper

The slim flavor has no shell and no wget. Build a wrapper image when you need them:

FROM alpine:3.21
COPY --from=ghcr.io/kennycallado/rust-camel:{VERSION}-slim /usr/local/bin/camel /usr/local/bin/camel

Install guidance

Release download

GitHub release assets carry the flavor prefix in the name:

• slim: camel-slim-<target>.tar.gz (musl x2)
• regular: camel-<target>.tar.gz (the 4 Linux targets)
• full: camel-full-<target>.tar.gz (gnu x2, macOS x2, Windows)

Android (Termux)

Android is not a release target, but the aarch64-unknown-linux-musl slim/regular binaries run under Termux. Android ships no system CA store at the probed paths, so:

• since the release after 0.51.0 the base HTTP component carries bundled Mozilla webpki roots as a fallback — startup and plain HTTP work out of the box, and TLS verifies against Mozilla's root set (a warn names the fallback);
• for the Termux-maintained trust store instead, run pkg install ca-certificates and export SSL_CERT_FILE="$PREFIX/etc/tls/ca-bundle.crt" — with native roots present the fallback stays inactive (see Installation: Android (Termux)).

Docker

Pull the semantic tag for the flavor you want:

docker pull ghcr.io/kennycallado/rust-camel:regular
docker pull ghcr.io/kennycallado/rust-camel:slim
docker pull ghcr.io/kennycallado/rust-camel:full

cargo install

cargo install camel-cli builds the regular flavor from source. The build is pure Rust. It needs no C toolchain. The four principled exclusions stay out of the default build.

cargo binstall

cargo binstall camel-cli installs the fullest prebuilt binary for your platform from GitHub releases. On musl it installs the regular flavor. Other flavors come via docker tags, direct release download, or cargo install --features. Slim additionally needs --no-default-features. Prebuilts via binstall start at the first metadata-bearing release (0.51.0). Older versions carry no binstall metadata, so they have no project-hosted prebuilt routing and binstall may serve a third-party quickinstall build instead; for a guaranteed source compile of an older version use cargo install camel-cli --version <version> (yields the regular flavor).

Everything

--features flavor-full enables every feature:

cargo install camel-cli --features flavor-full

Composition beyond presets

Flavors are presets, not walls. Compose beyond them with any feature name:

cargo install camel-cli --features flavor-regular,cxf

Breaking change at 0.50

The camel-<target> release asset re-aliases from the historical full-ish closure to the regular flavor at 0.50. This is a one-time semantic break. The latest Docker tag kept the full-no-kafka content at 0.50.0. It tracks regular from 0.51.0 (see the migration note). The 0.50 release notes reference this section as the canonical callout.

Before 0.50, camel-<target> carried the full-ish closure. After 0.50, it carries the regular closure. Users who need the full closure download camel-full-<target> or pull the :full image.

v0.50.0 shipped release assets with extensionless names, such as camel-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu. From the next release, every asset is a .tar.gz tarball with a matching .tar.gz.sha256 sidecar. Update a download script with one line:

curl -O https://github.com/kennycallado/rust-camel/releases/download/<tag>/camel-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz https://github.com/kennycallado/rust-camel/releases/download/<tag>/camel-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz.sha256 && sha256sum -c camel-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz.sha256 && tar -xzf camel-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz

Desktop targets (macOS, Windows) ship full only from 0.50: the clean camel-<target> regular name does not exist there. Scripts that download camel-x86_64-apple-darwin or camel-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.exe must switch to the camel-full- prefixed names. cargo install camel-cli still compiles the regular closure from source on every platform (a compile-guard leg proves macOS regular builds).

Windows 10 before version 1803 and Windows Server 2016 do not ship tar. Users on these systems must supply their own tar, such as 7-Zip or bsdtar.

Iteration policy

Flavors are presets, not walls. Additions flow down freely in minor releases. Moving a feature from full to regular to slim is non-breaking. Removals happen only at major releases.

How to move a feature between flavors

1. Edit the one flavor list in crates/camel-cli/Cargo.toml where the feature should start appearing. Bodies are chained, so one edit moves the feature for every flavor above it.
2. Update the contract prefix sets in crates/camel-cli/tests/feature_profiles.rs if a principle boundary is crossed. The sets are SLIM_FORBIDDEN_PREFIXES, REGULAR_FORBIDDEN_PREFIXES, REGULAR_REQUIRED_PREFIXES, and FULL_REQUIRED_PREFIXES.
3. Regenerate the golden fixture with the command documented in the feature_profiles.rs header.
4. Update the flavor table in this doc.

CI matrix legs never change. Legs are target by flavor. full_covers_universe goes red if a new feature is placed in no flavor.

Appendix: migration note for 0.51.0

Ready to paste into the 0.51.0 release notes:

The latest Docker tag now tracks the regular flavor. The -slim and -full families are the flavor-named tag families. The -alpine and -gnu tags are discontinued and frozen at their last content. Release-candidate rehearsals never move floating tags.

Appendix: rehearsal runbook

Release-time verification for the floating-tag quarantine. Executed at the 0.51.0-rc release time. Follow-up ticket rc-5t5fo.9 owns the post-0.51.0 verification pass.

0. Capture the digests of the six floating tags on both registries before pushing the rc tag. Example: docker manifest inspect ghcr.io/kennycallado/rust-camel:latest.
1. Push the v0.51.0-rc.N tag.
2. After the run, query both registries' tag timestamps. Use the Docker Hub API and GHCR. Assert latest, latest-slim, latest-full, regular, slim, full are unchanged. Compare against the pre-rehearsal digests.
3. Assert the rc-suffixed immutable tags exist (v0.51.0-rc.N, v0.51.0-rc.N-slim, v0.51.0-rc.N-full).

Reference: CLI crate