Shan

Shan is a declarative wrapper around your favourite package manager.

• Cross-platform: works on Linux, Windows and MacOS
• Simple: shan harnesses existing package managers to do the heavy lifting
• Declarative: sync to your config or let shan build it for you
• Wide support: shan supports tons of package managers out of the box
• Extensible: your package manager not supported? Add it in ~3 lines of code
• Fast: shan is compiled using GraalVM to make it super fast - no JVM here.

NOTE: Shan still isn't at 1.0 release, and as of now, it in fact does not support tons of package managers. My goal is, as of 1.0, to support:

• dpkg
• yay
• paru
• dnf
• brew
• chocolatey
• winget
• npm
• pip
• Gems

Table of Contents

• Why use shan?
• Using shan
  • Installing packages
  • Default package manager
  • Removing packages
  • Listing packages
  • Temporarily installed packages
• Contributing
  • Adding a package manager
• License

Why Shan?

Shan is for people who want to be able to manage their packages declaratively, but don't want the complexity that comes with other systems like NixOS or Guix. It's aim is to facilitate setting up new systems. If you've bought a new laptop and want to install everything you had with brew or you've decided you want to try out Linux and want to install you had in chocolatey. Maybe you like distro-hopping and want a way to get started quickly with all the packages you know and love, or maybe you just broke your Arch install and decided it's easier to nuke your system than fix the issue (I know I've been there).

If you've ever been in any of these situations, try out shan. Shan works for everyone, no matter what operating system you're using, no matter what package managers you're using.

Usage

All the commands available at the moment are: install, add-repo remove, del-repo sync, rollback edit, default purge, merge list, gen

Installing packages

Installing packages with shan is easily done through the install or in subcommand.

shan install nodejs

For example will install nodejs using the default package manager.

You can also specify to shan which package manager should be used to install a package:

shan install nodejs -npm react

And this will install nodejs using the default package manager, and then react using npm.

You can also mix and match things in any order and install as many packages as you want in a single command:

shan install nodejs python -npm react react-native -pip PyYAML wakatime -npm expo

Every time you install a package, the package will also be added to your config file so that down the road, you'll have everything available to you in a declarative config.

Package versions

For most package managers, you can specify which version of a package you want when installing a package:

$ shan install -npm react=17.0.2 -pip wakatime=13.1.0

Default package manager

Most people probably don't want to need to specify which package manager to use every time they want to install something. Most people also probably use one package manager more often than others, like yay or brew. For these purposes, shan allows you to set a default package manager to use.

shan default yay

This will set yay to be the default package manager that shan should use. Now, when you install a package using shan install <package>, you don't need to tell shan that it should use yay to install it, shan will use the default.

Removing packages

When removing a package using Shan, it's generally able to figure out which package manager it should be using to remove a package. Let's say we have the following packages installed:

yay
nodejs neovim atop

npm
react underscore atop

Now, if we want to remove nodejs, we simply have to do:

shan remove nodejs

And shan will figure out which package manager to remove nodejs using. Unlike installing, where it'll install using your default package manager, removing will simply remove from where the package exists.

shan remove nodejs neovim react

Will remove nodejs and neovim using yay, and react will be removed using npm.

We do however have atop installed here in both yay and npm. In this case, Shan will prompt you for which package manager you want to uninstall atop from.

You can also specify instead if you'd like

$ shan rm -yay atop

But for convenience sake, you don't have to.

A package also doesn't need to be in your config to uninstall it.

shan rm emacs

If you remove a package that isn't in your config, shan will look at which package mangers are available on your system, then check if that package is installed using any of those package managers. If it is, then it'll remove the package using that package manager, and let you know where it found it.

Listing packages

Knowing which packages you have installed and being able to easily search for them is important. That's why shan provides utilities for listing everything you have installed in a variety of ways.

$ shan list
yay
neovim nodejs emacs

npm
react-native expo-cli

pip
wakatime

You can also add flags to the list command to get the data in a variety of formats.

$ shan list --json
{
    "yay": ["neovim", "nodejs", "emacs"],
    "npm": ["react-native", "expo-cli"],
    "pip": ["wakatime"]
}
$ shan list --parse
yay neovim
yay nodejs
yay emacs
npm react-native
npm expo-cli
pip wakatime

Temporary packages

Sometimes you want to quickly install a package to test it out, but you don't necessarily want it to be added to your config. When installing or removing a package, shan supports the ability to make "temporary" changes. This means that the changes you make won't get added to your config file.

shan install -t nodejs -npm react

Will install nodejs using the default package manager and react using npm, however neither of these packages will get added to your config. Instead, the changes will be saved in a separate file. This way, shan can act against that file independently of your config. For example if you want to uninstall everything temporary, you can simply do

shan purge

And shan will delete everything temporarily installed. To protect you from accidentally purging your actual config, you can only purge your temporary one.

In addition to purging your temporary files, you can also merge your list of temporary packages with your config. This will take all packages installed temporarily and add them to your shan.edn file.

shan merge

Contributing

Any and all contributions are more than welcome! If you have a feature request, a question, or a bug to report, make an issue. If you think you can make the feature or fix the bug, a PR would be awesome.

Adding a Package Manager

shan doesn't support every package manager, but I would love it to! If you're interested in adding a package manager, you can request it get added in an issue.

If you'd like to take a shot at adding one yourself, it's very simple though.

1. Open src/shan/managers.clj

2. In the package-managers map at the top of the file, add a new entry for your package manager. Each value is a map, with at least 3 entries: :install, :remove, :installed?.

   1. For the :install value, put the command to install a package with your package manager.
   2. For the :remove value, put the command to remove a package.
   3. For the :installed? value, put the command to check if a package is locally installed.

   There are other values that can and should be added if you want to get full usage out of the given package manager. Other supported keys are :type, :list, :add-archive, :remove-archive, pre-install.

   1. The :type key should be what type of package manager it is. Possible values are :system and :language. The default is :system.
   2. :list is a little complicated. It should be present for all package managers, but it's not required. If you don't know Clojure, feel free to leave this one to the maintainers. If you do know it, take a look at the src/shan/managers/list.clj file. The value for :list should be a function that gets a list of all packages installed via that package manager, and creates a list of all of them.
   3. The :add-archive and :remove-archive keys are strings that contain the command to add a new package archive for the package manager. Not all package managers have package archives, so this isn't necessary for some.
   4. :pre-install is something that will run before any packages get installed using that package manager. This is useful for doing things like updating the package archives so that packages you want that aren't in the default archives become available.

Example:

{:pip {:install "python -m pip install"
       :remove "python -m pip uninstall -y"
       :installed? "python -m pip show"}}

Questions? Put up an issue or make a PR with what you've got so far.

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2021 Philip Dumaresq