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pellets

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.

Config File

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.

Starting out

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.

AUR Packages

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 "$@"

Installation

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pellets

Publishing to AUR

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