Verbose Logging

software development with some really amazing hair

T + G I F R

apt-runner: Just Install It For Me, Please!

· · Posted in Programming
Tagged with

Picture this: You are reading some tutorial or whatever, and you need to install some things. So you run 'aptitude install prog1 prog2'. Then you realize you need prog3 and 4 too, so you CTRL+C that, and run 'aptitude install prog1 prog2 prog3 prog4'. Then you see you need something else. Rinse and repeat.

This is really annoying.

The worst part is you can't run multiple aptitude instances, because they'll whine about file locks or something. I just want to tell it to install stuff for me, and do it when you get the time. I understand you can't do it now, but install this when you can.

So I wrote this little app, which is very small, very minimal, and will probably break, but works for me. It's pretty much the simplest thing that could possibly work

apt-runner

Basically, it watches for new files in a directory, and if a new file is created, will pass the contents to aptitude. You need sudo NOPASSWD enabled for the aptitude binary for this to work though.

So you run this little daemon that watches the files, and then instead of running aptitude, you run auo-apt, and it will pass things off through the daemon. So you can do this:

apt-runner install foo; apt-runner install bar; apt-runner install baz

And all those programs will get installed, eventually. The commands get run one by one, not necessarily in order.

This does what I want. It just accepts my commands to install things, and does them eventually, and doesn't whine about file locks, and you don't have to kill things.

You can use it too, if you want. Just grab the code from Github and try it out. More information is in the readme.