pellets [<config>] [--aur-install <command>]
A declarative pacman wrapper for Arch Linux. The goal of pellets is to allow
you to tersely specify what packages you expect to be installed and keep your
system tidy by removing packages that aren't needed. It's also great for
bootstrapping a new system. Pellets doesn't prevent you from installing new
packages manually to try them out, but it will help you remember to keep a
transcript of those you want to stay around.
You start by specifying an annotated file of packages you want installed, like this:
# Apps
google-chrome [aur]
vlc
# Tools
maim # used to take screenshots
# X11
xorg [group]
xmonad
Then, when you run pellets, it will look at the current explicitly-installed
packages, compare them to the list, and install, remove, or modify to make your
system match the config file.
$ pellets
install maim
remove scrot
mark-explicit xorg-xrandr
Proceed? [Y/n/dry]:
The specific actions it can take are:
| in config | install reason | action |
|---|---|---|
| yes | not installed | install |
| yes | installed as dep | mark-explicit |
| yes | explicitly installed | none |
| no | not installed | none |
| no | installed as dep | none |
| no | explicitly installed | mark-dependency OR remove |
Marking a package as an explicit installation or dependency is mostly for bookkeeping purposes. It uses this information to prompt to prune unused dependency packages after the previous step is complete.
You can specify a path to a config file on the command line. If none is
specified, pellets will look in the default location using XDG Base Directory
specification which is typically ~/.config/pellets/packages. Note that
even when run with sudo, ~ will resolve to the calling user's $HOME
directory. If you are using $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, you must use sudo -E to
preserve the environment.
A config file is simply a list of packages and comments. Comments begin with a
# and can appear at any point in the line. Packages are specified one per
line. There are two modifiers for packages:
[aur]indicates that this package is built via the Arch User Repository (see below)[group]indicates that this is a package group
You may also specify a provision instead of a package in the same way you could
for pacman. This means that "python-neovim" and "python-pynvim" would both match
against the python-pynvim package which provides "python-neovim".
Provision and group resolution happens on each run. This means that if a group was installed and a package was later added to the group, that new package will be installed on the next run of pellets. This is inconsistent with how pacman works -- pacman only remembers the actual packages that were installed, not by what method they were installed.
If a package is not explicitly listed and only optionally depended on by other packages, it will be removed. You should add it to your config if you wish to keep it.
If you're starting from a blank slate, you can query what is currently installed on your system:
$ pacman -Q --quiet --explicit --native && pacman -Q --quiet --explicit --foreign | xargs printf "%s [aur]\n"
Many of these packages will come from groups. If you want to learn about what
groups you might have installed, use pacman -Q --explicit --groups to get a
hint. The most common groups are base-devel and xorg.
By default, AUR packages are not installed since this isn't intended to be an
entire toolchain for building AUR packages. Instead, you can optionally pass a
command prefix with --aur-install that accepts packages on the command line.
For example:
pellets --aur-install "aura -A"
Alternatively, you can place an executable file at the path
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/pellets/aur-install (where $XDG_CONFIG_HOME defaults to
~/.config). If --aur-install is not specified and the file is present, it
will be used. For example:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
exec aura -A --unsuppress --noconfirm "$@"
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pellets
This section is mostly for me, for when I forget the steps next time. Push a new tag:
VERSION=1.0.0
git tag $VERSION
git push --tags
Check the digest:
curl -L https://github.com/dpatti/pellets/archive/refs/tags/$VERSION.tar.gz | md5sum
Edit PKGBUILD, updating pkgver and md5sums. Update AUR repo:
git clone [email protected]/pellets.git aur
cd aur
ln ../PKGBUILD .
makepkg
makepkg --printsrcinfo | tee .SRCINFO
git ci -am $VERSION