Package Lists

This directory contains files that describe the packages installed on my various systems.

The intent of this is to:

• Be able to easily "sync" what packages I have installed across similar machines
• Backup the list of installed packages on a machine, in case I have to re-install the OS
• Be able to more easily "audit" changes to the packages installed on a machine

Generating the lists

Since the various machines that I use, use different operating systems, the procedures for generating these lists is different per environment. I'll list the process per OS/env here:

Ubuntu/apt:

1. Install apt-clone (Should be able to do this via sudo apt install apt-clone)
2. Generate the package state via sudo apt-clone clone "$(./generate-apt-clone-name)"

... Or just generate it more simply, since apt-clone is kind of tricky to actually use, like so:

apt list --installed 2>/dev/null | sed 's/\/.*//g > packages'

macOS/Homebrew:

1. Install Homebrew Bundle (Should happen on first attempt to run brew bundle)
2. Generate the package state via brew bundle dump --force --describe --file=/path/Brewfile.hostname.os

Restoring from the lists

Again, the procedures are dependent on the OS.

Ubuntu/apt:

Use one of two ways...

1. Attempt to restore the packages through apt-clone restore (this likely won't work across multiple different distro versions)
   • sudo apt-clone restore FILE_NAME_HERE
2. Or restore "cleverly" via a simple new-line-delimited list of package names

   # Filter packages for those available
   while read package; do apt show "$package" 2>/dev/null | grep -qvz 'State:.*(virtual)' && echo "$package" >>packages-valid && echo -ne "\r\033[K$package"; done <packages
   
   # Install the available packages all at once
   sudo apt install $(tr '\n' ' ' <packages-valid)

macOS/Homebrew:

1. Restore via brew bundle install --file=/path/Brewfile.hostname.os
2. Go make some coffee...