A statically linked, native, platform agnostic Git-based package manager written in Rust.

• 1. Getting started
  • 1.1. Creating a package repository
  • 1.2. Publishing your first package
  • 1.3. Installing your first package
• 2. Build
  • 2.1. Development build
  • 2.2. Release (static) build
• 3. Authentication
• 5. Package reference formatting
  • 5.1. Refspec
  • 5.2. URI
• 4. Working with multiple package repositories
• 6. Logging
• 7. Commands
  • 7.1. update
  • 7.2. clean
  • 7.3. install
  • 7.4. download
• 8. FAQ
  • 8.1. Why GPM?
  • 8.2. Why Git? Why not just curl or wget or whatever?
  • 8.3. But Git does not like large binary files!
  • Why storing packages as ZIP archives?

1. Create a git-lfs enabled Git repository, for example a GitHub or GitLab repository.
2. Install git-lfs on your local computer.
3. Clone the newly created repository on your local computer:

git clone ssh://path.to/my/package-repository.git
cd package-repository

4. Enable git-lfs tracking for *.zip files:

git lfs track "*.zip"

5. Add, commit and push .gitattributes:

git add .gitattributes
git commit -a -m "Enable git-lfs."
git push

Voilà! You're all set to publish your first package!

In this example, we're going to create a simple hello-world package and publish it.

1. Make sure you are at the root of the package repository created in the previous section.
2. Create and enter the package directory:

mkdir hello-world && cd hello-world

3. Create the hello-world.sh script:

echo "#/bin/sh\necho 'Hello World!'" > hello-world.sh

4. Create your package archive:

zip hello-world.zip hello-world.sh

5. Add and commit your package archive:

git add hello-world.zip
git commit hello-world.zip -m "Publish hello-world version 1.0"

6. Tag your package release with a specific version number:

git tag hello-world/1.0

7. Push your new package:

git push
git push --tags

Your hello-world/1.0 package is now stored in your package repository and can be installed using gpm!

1. Download or build gpm.
2. Add your package repository to the gpm sources:

mkdir -p ~/.gpm/sources.list
echo "ssh://path.to/my/package-repository.git" >> ~/.gpm/sources.list

3. Update the gpm cache:

gpm update

4. Install your package:

gpm install hello-world/1.0 --prefix ~/

Your hello-world/1.0 package is now installed and you can run it with sh ~/hello-world.sh.

Dependencies:

• OpenSSL

cargo build

Dependencies:

• Docker

docker run \
    --rm -it \
    -v "$(pwd)":/home/rust/src \
    -v "/home/${USER}/.cargo":/home/rust/.cargo \
    ekidd/rust-musl-builder \
    cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

If the repository is "public", then no authentication should be required.

Otherwise, for now, only authentication through a passphrase-less SSH private key is supported. The path to that SSH private key must be set in the GPM_SSH_KEY environment variable.

A package can be referenced using a Git refspec. The best practice is to use a Git tag with the following format:

${name}/${version}

where:

• name is the name of the package,
• version is the version of the package.

Example: my-package/2.0

In this case, gpmh will look for that refspec in all the repositories listed in ~/.gpm/sources.list and available in the cache.

For such package reference to be found, you must make sure:

• the repository where that package is stored is listed in ~/.gpm/sources.list (see Working with multiple package repositories),
• the cache has been updated by calling gpm update.

A package can also be referenced using a full Git URI formatted like this:

${remote-uri}#${refspec}

where:

• remote-uri is the full URI to the Git remote,
• refspec is the refspec for the package (usually a Git tag).

Example:

ssh://github.com/my/awesome-packages.git#app/2.0

In this case, gpm will clone the corresponding Git repository and look for the package there. gpm will look for the specified package only in the specified repository.

Specifying a full package URI might not be practical. It's simpler to specify a package refspec and let gpm find it. But where should it look for it?

When you specify a package using a refspec, gpm will have to find the proper package repository. It will look for this refspec in the repositories listed in ~/.gpm/sources.list.

The following command lines will fill sources.list with a few (dummy) package repositories:

echo "ssh://path.to/my/package-repository.git" >> ~/.gpm/sources.list
echo "ssh://path.to/my/another-repository.git" >> ~/.gpm/sources.list
echo "ssh://path.to/my/yet-another-repository.git" >> ~/.gpm/sources.list
# ...

After updating sources.list, don't forget to call gmp update to update the cache.

You can then install packages using their refspec.

By default, gpm will echo nothing on stdout.

Logs can be enable by setting the GPM_LOG environment variable to one of the following values:

• trace
• debug
• info
• warn
• error

Example:

GPM_LOG=info gpm update

Logs can be very verbose. So it's best to keep only the gpm and gitlfs module logs. For example:

GPM_LOG="gpm=debug,gitlfs=debug" gpm install hello-world/1.0

Update the cache to feature the latest revision of each repository listed in ~/.gpm/sources.list.

Example:

# first add at least one remote
echo "ssh://github.com/my/awesome-packages.git" >> ~/.gpm/sources.list
echo "ssh://github.com/my/other-packages.git" >> ~/.gpm/sources.list
# ...
# then you can run an update:
gpm update

Clean the cache. The cache is located in ~/.gpm/cache. Cache can be rebuilt using the update command.

gpm clean

Download and install a package.

Example:

# install the "app" package at version 2.0 from repository ssh://github.com/my/awesome-packages.git
# in the /var/www/app folder
gpm install ssh://github.com/my/awesome-packages.git#app/2.0 \
    --prefix /var/www/app

# assuming the repository ssh://github.com/my/awesome-packages.git is in ~/.gpm/sources.list
# and the cache has been updated using `gpm update`
gpm install app/2.0 --prefix /var/www/app

Download a package in the current working directory.

Example:

# install the "app" package at version 2.0 from repository ssh://github.com/my/awesome-packages.git
# in the /var/www/app folder
gpm download ssh://github.com/my/awesome-packages.git#app/2.0 \
    --prefix /var/www/app

# assuming the repository ssh://github.com/my/awesome-packages.git is in ~/.gpm/sources.list
# and the cache has been updated using `gpm update`
gpm download app/2.0 --prefix /var/www/app

GPM means "Git-based Package Manager".

The main motivation is to have a platform-agnostic package manager, mainly aimed at distributing binary packages as archives. GPM can be used to leverage any Git repository as a package repository.

Platforms like GitLab and GitHub are then very handy to manage such package archives, permissions, etc...

GPM is also available as an all-in-one static binary. It can be leveraged to download some packages that will be used to bootrasp a more complex provisioing process.

GPM aims at leveraging the Git ecosystem and features.

Git is great to manage revisions. So it's great at managing package versions! For example, Git is also used by the Docker registry to store Docker images.

Git also has a safe and secured native authentication/authorization strategy through SSH. With GitLab, you can safely setup deploy keys to give a read-only access to your packages.

Yes. Cloning a repository full of large binary files can take a lot of time and space. You certainly don't want to checkout all the versions of all your packages everytime you want to install one of them.

That's why you should use git-lfs for your GPM repositories.

Thanks to git-lfs, GPM will download the a actual binary package only when it is required.

Vanilla Git will compress objects. But git-lfs doesn't store objects in the actual Git repository: they are stored "somewhere else".

To make sure we don't use too much disk space/bandwidth "somewhere else", the package archive is stored compressed.

gpm is using ZIP because:

• it's the most common compression algorithms already supported by Rust;
• tools to create ZIP archives are widely available and easy to use.

gpm might support other compression algorithms in the future.