Install a public package

Installing public packages

How to install a public package #

Incidentally, using the packages list in your local repositories file, you can install packages that are on GitHub but the auth didn’t add it to a package manager*. All without needed the package authors to even know that fox exists. As long as their releases follow a pattern that fox can understand (which is the same pattern most package managers use), you should be able to do it (exceptions apply).

We can use this repo I randomly found as an example:

packages:
  - path: metadelta/mdlt
    executableName: mdlt
    type: binary

You can edit the ~/.fox/repositories.yaml file manually, or you can run the command to do it automatically:

fox add package --path "metadelta/mdlt" --type "binary" --executableName "mdlt"

And now you can do fox update and then a quick fox install mdlt and bam! You have it without the author needing to do anything.

* I can’t blame them, it is unnecessary difficult; specially for private repos. That’s why I made 🦊 fox in the first place. It was easier to create a new package manager that works on macOS and linux than to add my CLI tool to HomeBrew because it was a private repo.