Declarative package management for apt. Useful with Ubuntu, Debian, or other related distros.

It can be hard to remember why I've installed all the packages on my system. This can cause various issues:

• My system is full of crufty packages that I don't really need. For example, if I temporarily install some packages to compile something, I'll probably never remove them later.
• It's easy to accidentally remove important packages. For example, if I install apt-listbugs, that will pull in ruby, and mark it as automatically installed. Later if I decide I don't want apt-listbugs, an apt autoremove will get rid of ruby, even if I'm using it for lots of other things!
• It's hard to setup my packages on a new system. I can't just look at my previous system, cuz I have no idea what all its packages were for.
• I can't tell what I used to have in the past. If I was previously developing on some project, I probably installed a bunch of packages, and maybe removed them later. If I want to get back to that project, I doubt I can remember exactly which packages I used.

• Make sure you have some basic packages installed: ruby and aptitude.
• Copy aptkeeper somewhere in your PATH, for example ~/bin or /usr/local/bin.
• Create a directory ~/.config/aptkeeper to declare your packages
  • Inside that directory, create one or more files with the extension .keep.
  • Each file should contain a list of packages you want to keep installed. Comments starting with '#' are allowed, as are blank lines.
  • You can get a reasonable initial list of packages with aptkeeper candidates
• Once you think you're satisfied, run aptkeeper diff. It will tell you what it thinks needs removing or installing.
  • Then, run aptkeeper sync to do the installation or removal! It will take care of installing and removing dependencies.
• Later, when you want to make changes, just edit your .keep files, then run aptkeeper sync

An example .keep file might look like:

# Browsers
firefox
chromium
epiphany-browser # aka "Gnome Web"

ripgrep tmux git # CLI tools

• Put your aptkeeper directory in git! Then you'll have a history of your changes.
• Use comments to remind yourself why you wanted a package, so you know whether you still need it.
• Need a single package, and too lazy to open your editor? Just run aptkeeper add foo "my reason" mypackage, and it will automatically put it in foo.keep and install it. Then you can organize it properly later, when you have more time.
• Put packages required for a project in a separate .keep file, so you remember that they're related. Now they're easy to remove all at once!
  • Similarly, you can put related packages nearby each other, so they're easy to block-comment and get rid of.
• There's no harm in listing a package twice! Eg: if it's needed for multiple projects, you can list it in multiple .keep files.
• Copy your whole aptkeeper dir to a new system, to setup packages just like on the old one.
• Feel free to install some packages temporarily with apt, without using aptkeeper, as long as it's safe for them to be autoremoved later.

Install and remove packages to match the keeper files

Print the packages that would be installed or removed by a sync

Adds packages to BASENAME.keep with a comment, and installs them. Good for small changes when you're too busy to open an editor.

List packages not listed in .keep, and with no dependencies. Good for finding candidates to add to .keep files, especially when starting out.

keepers: List packages in .keep files

missing: List packages to be installed

unneeded: List packages to be removed

install: Install missing packages (but don't remove anything)

remove: Remove unneeded packages (but don't install anything)

update-apt: Unconditionally update apt-mark / debfoster

Debfoster is a great tool to find what packages you need. It's got a great command-line interface that prompts you for different packages in turn, and it's much better tested that aptkeeper.

But it has weaknesses:

• Debfoster doesn't support multiple keeper files, or comments. It's easy to forget why you installed something, or which packages were installed for related reasons.
• You can't store your keeper file in git, unless you want to run git as root.
• If a package is no longer installed, debfoster will silently drop it from the keeper list!
• Debfoster doesn't understand that a single system can have packages from multiple architectures, which can confuse its dependency calculations.

Apt already has a built-in concept of marking packages as "manual" or "automatically" installed. You can use the apt-mark command to manipulate this, and apt autoremove will cleanup packages that are longer needed.

But:

• apt-mark has no user-visible keeper file at all!
  • You can't put your keepers in git.
  • You can't add comments or split things into multiple files.
• By default, apt assumes that when you install a package, it's desired as a keeper. This makes it too easy to install packages without remembering why.

pacdef is a multi-backend declarative package management system. You can manage packages across a variety of different distros and language-specific package managers, like cargo or pip. It supports a hierarchical system of package grouping, where entire groups of packages can be imported or removed from your system.

But:

• There are serious bugs that make pacdef very difficult to compile.
• It's much more complex than I need.
• It doesn't support certain use cases I like, such as commenting out a whole file when I'm done with a project.

These are great tools to set up systems. But they're designed for production systems that should mostly stay unchanged. End-user systems constantly have packages being installed and removed, and are a better fit for something like aptkeeper.

• aptkeeper will overwrite your apt-mark and debfoster keepers. I think of this as a feature, since it makes it easier to use all these tools together. But you might not! Aptkeeper does keep backups in /var/lib/apt/extended_states.bak and /var/lib/debfoster/keepers.bak
• Your .keep files are not a full description of the packages installed on your system. Apt dependencies can be optional, or can have multiple packages that satisfy a given dependency, and there's no way for aptkeeper to understand your intentions. Typically it works, but if you need to have absolutely identical packages on different systems, use a different solution like dpkg --get-selections.
• aptkeeper may consider "Recommends" or "Suggests" dependencies as important enough to keep the dependent package installed. You can change this by setting the apt configuration option APT::AutoRemove::RecommendsImportant / SuggestsImportant. You may also want to regularly look for broken recommends: aptitude search '~RBrecommends:~i'.

• debfoster for apt-based distros (Debian, Ubuntu, etc)
• pacdef for Arch-based distros
• pacmanfile, also for Arch-based distros
• Homebrew's bundle capabilities.
• The set -A and autoremove subcommands of FreeBSD's pkg
• The selected set of Gentoo's Portage, along with the --select, --deselect and --depclean options.
• The mark and autoremove subcommands of Fedora's dnf
• Of course, the declarative systems of Nix and Guix

Also some previous attempts of mine at this sort of thing:

• brewfoster for Homebrew
• rpmkeeper and yumkeeper for yum-based distros
• zyppkeeper for OpenSUSE's zypper.