How to get unity without Hub?

The Unity Hub is nice...sort of. But not useful for headless environments. I noticed that Hub is updated with the latest Unity releases, but that we no longer get notifications about downloads for the old-style installer. The best I can do is actually install stuff with Hub and dig through the logs for the download location and try to figure out what to do with that tar file. I used to have a nice set of Dockerfiles for my build images that got updated with each Linux release, but I'm sorta stuck on 2018.2.7 now. Any suggestions how to keep CI working? Even if I had the money for it, Unity Cloud Build is not a replacement.

 

Digging through the Hub logs (in .config on linux and [UserAppDataFolder]\Roaming on Windows) yielded something useful:

https://public-cdn.cloud.unity3d.com/hub/prod/releases-linux.json
and
https://public-cdn.cloud.unity3d.com/hub/prod/releases-win32.json

Hub tries to refresh this, so I downloaded the linux releases. It contains the paths for all the binary downloads, which all seem to be archives inside archives with pretty predictable names. The Windows downloads are the same old executable component installers, so probably automatable on the CLI. The linux archives are just the actual binaries, so they'd need to be extracted to the appropriate locations and probably have the programs marked as executable. If/when I get this working, I'll update my dockerfiles and finally get new images (https://hub.docker.com/u/angusmf/) out for the missing 2018.2 releases.

 

Findings:

1. The links above only contain the latest releases, so you'd have to download them before the next release if you wanted those links.
2. Extracting the Unity.tar.xz file and installing all the required libs (see here: https://github.com/angusmf/Unity-dependencies/blob/master/Dockerfile) will get Unity to start. You then have to activate.
3. The majority of the modules are .pkg files, with no clear way to install them. I guess they are the same/similar as macOS installer files, since you can open them with xar, but there's no obvious way to run that install process on Linux without either Hub or the old installer. The pkg contains a few flat files and some other archives Ubuntu couldn't open.

That's as far as I'm going to go with it. I feel discouraged from hacking further. It's never been clear to me if using Unity-for-Linux to do build in containers (the reason I care about this) is possible without violating the license terms. It would be great to have clarity on that and whether any of this is related to Cloud Build and sales of Pro licenses.

I love Unity and making games, but operations is burned into my soul by 20 years of forcing other people's software to work. From my very first jobs, where I had to fight to get install and config scripts in source control, to the glorious future we all live in, the grunt work that makes software possible and occasionally successful has always felt like an afterthought in development culture. In that vein, I can't take claims of democratization seriously if an absolutely critical piece of the infrastructure is kept behind a very expensive paywall. Collaborate and Cloud Build are not production-capable systems anyway, so this is very discouraging. Unity, the editor and runtimes, is an amazing piece of technology, but the value is that you can learn so much of it without paying. I contend that if you want people to create amazing things in Unity, we need to be able to learn, create and extend every part of the ecosystem.

 

Linux editor installer is showing now in https://unity3d.com/pt/unity/beta-download
Then, i guess after 2018.3 we can get unity in the same place as mac and windows

 

I sure hope so. Has that been stated anywhere? I haven't seen anything about the Linux editor coming out of beta. On the flip side, I'm concerned that since we haven't gotten installers for 2018.2 or earlier for a month, that Hub may be the the only install option in the future. It doesn have a CLI and the hub team has not indicated it will definitely ever get one.
It has been stated somewhere on the forum Unity won't be releasing container images.

 

Ok, good news on this is those DLs are still there, just not with any public link I can find. Each release has a key associated with it. 2018.2.11f1 was 38bd7dec5000, which you can see in all the installer and component downloads for Mac and Windows. Sub that value into

https://beta.unity3d.com/download/[RELASE_KEY]/UnitySetup

Interestingly, the old links that were posted had the version number included in the filename, so for fun, I tried that link also, and it worked. So for 2018.2.11f1, either of these is a valid download:

https://beta.unity3d.com/download/38bd7dec5000/UnitySetup

https://beta.unity3d.com/download/38bd7dec5000/UnitySetup-2018.2.11f1

I feel pretty stupid for not noticing this earlier!!