mars

apk

Alpine packages keeper

Repositories

3 layers:

  1. mirror hosts
  2. release (collections of snapshots) of
  3. repositories

3 repositories

  1. main
  2. community
  3. testing

Specified in

/etc/apk/repositories

Format of entries is [@type] [url], e.g.

# comment
https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main
/var/apk/my-packages

Public keys of the official Alpine repositories are already included on the system by the alpine-keys package.

apk update

Updating repositories indexes.

apk update

We don’t need to do this usually, other apk commands that depend on the repository index will automatically do this once the 4 hour cache expires.

The “world”

List of all installed packages we asked to be installed (a la brew leaves):

cat /etc/apk/world

From docs.alpinelinux.org/user-handbook:

The packages you want to have explicitly installed are listed in the “world file” available in /etc/apk/world. It is safe to edit by hand. If you’ve edited it by hand, you may run apk add with no arguments to bring the package selection to a consistent state.

To view all installed packages, including transitive deps,

apk info

The same can be viewed with more details by using apk list -I

diff <(apk info | wc -l) <(apk list --installed | wc -l)

Searching packages by binary

cmd: prefix. There is also so:.

apk search cmd:dig

More info in docs.alpinelinux.org/user-handbook.

Package contents

The --contents flag (aka -L) to apk info can be used to list the files included in the package.

apk info --contents doas

doas-6.8.2-r8 contains:
etc/doas.conf
usr/bin/doas

This only works if the package is already installed. To check whether a package is installed, use --installed (nick -e), which exits non-zero if it is not installed, otherwise prints the name of the package.

apk info --installed doas

doas

The --provides flag is similar to --installed, but (a) it lists only the binaries and libraries provided by the package, and (b) works even if the package is not installed.

apk info --provides doas

doas-6.8.2-r8 provides:
cmd:doas=6.8.2-r8

Rdepends

To see which packages depend on a given package, use the --rdepends (-r)

apk info --rdepends font-dejavu

font-dejavu-2.37-r6 is required by:
xfce4-4.20-r0

apk dot prints a dependency graph, parseable by Graphviz ideally, but also humans in a pinch.

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