Package Manager

Abstract

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• A tool that automates the entire process of installing, updating, configuring, and removing software on your computer. Also handling dependencies under the hood

Effortless Management

Without a package manager, you’d have to hunt down software, figure out all its dependencies, install everything in the right order – a tedious and error-prone process. Some may even require you to compile from source which requires a compiling tool chain.

• The list below shows the comparison of commands of package managers lik Brew, apt & Pacman etc

Brew

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• The Package Manager for MacOS
• Install with /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
• Interesting analytics data

Package Management

List all the installed packages: brew list

Check for outdated package: brew outdated

Upgrade all packages: brew upgrade

Check for deprecated packages: brew doctor

Brew Formula

Simple Ruby scripts, we can easily revert our modifications and merge upstream updates with brew edit <PACKAGE_NAME>.

Brew Tap

Add additional repositories that extend the core Homebrew installation, so we can install a wider range of command-line tools and utilities. You can list all the repositories brew taps on with brew tap.

Brew Cask

Extension to Homebrew that allow you to install full-fledged macOS GUI applications. You can list all the apps installed with brew cash with brew list --cask.

Brew Bottles

These are pre-compiled binary packages created by Homebrew maintainers or the community. They save you the time and effort of compiling a formula from source code.

Poured from Bottle

When you see a message like “Pouring <package_name>”, it means Homebrew is installing the package using a pre-compiled bottle instead of building it from source.

Pipx

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• Package Manager for Python Applications
• Install with Brew - brew install pipx && pipx ensurepath

Package Management

List all the installed packages: pipx list

Upgrade all packages: pipx upgrade-all

Caution

Currently, there isn’t a way to check for outdated packaged. Refer to this issue for more updates on this matter.

NPM

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• Package Manager for Node.js Applications
• Come with NVM

Package Management

npm list -g - list all the installed packages

npm update -g - update all the packages

npm outdated -g - check for outdated packages

Obtain the absolute path to global node modules

npm root -g
 
# We can take advantage of this to copy certain runtime dep to the production build
cp -R $(npm root -g)/dd-trace ./traced-deps/node_modules

Manage package.json

With the use of npm pkg

# Example, set a script called 'pre-commit'
npm pkg set scripts.pre-commit="npx prettier . --write && npx oxlint"

package-lock.json

When we install a package, it is recorded as package@^1.11.10, 1.11.10 is using Semantic Versioning. This means if that package releases a new version, and we run npm install, it will grab the newer version without our notice! package-lock.json ensures it doesn’t grab the latest version unless we explicitly ask it to do so. This ensures the dependencies we install across different collaborators are the same.

Cargo

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• Package Manager for Rust, installed along with the Rust Toolset

Package Management

ls ~/.cargo/bin - list all the installed packages

Updating packages - Cargo doesn’t come with a command to upgrade installed packages. We need to re-install the packages to update the packages.

Pacman

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• Package Manager for Arch distros

Pacman on Tren!

Paru is a wrapper around Pacman written in Rust. Very similar syntax, zero learning curve.

Package Management

Install packages: pacman -S

Search for a package: pacman -Ss

Upgrade all packages: pacman -Syu

Remove a package: pacman -R

Install package from package-name.pkg.tar.xz

sudo pacman -U package-name.pkg.tar.xz

Basher

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• A Package Manager for shell scripts. You can install it with curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/basherpm/basher/master/install.sh | bash. Refer to its Github Page for more information

Basic usage

Install package: basher install <github_username>/<project_name> or the full URL to the git repo that isn’t hosted on Github.

Uninstall package: basher install <github_username>/<project_name>

Check for outdated package: basher outdated

Upgrade all packages: basher upgrade --all

Download from Github

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• Github has many useful tools, but some of them aren’t part of Package Manager we can use on our system. We can still install the executables without compiling ourselves if they offer releases

Install executables from Github releases page

Install the executable using wget -qO package.tbz <GITHUB_PROJECT_URL>/releases/latest/download/<ASSET_FILENAME>.

Then we can decompress the file with tar xf <ASSET_FILENAME>, go into the decompressed folder and move the executable to /usr/local/bin. And now we should be able to call the executable from the Terminal!

Caution

We need to manually update the packages installed.

References

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• Package manager - Wikipedia