commit afec8caa5b74e81e7427cdf1240711429e2d9ed8
parent de57a12e9a5daadedf649aba4b5c498983ff4347
Author: Sebastiano Tronto <sebastiano@tronto.net>
Date: Sat, 16 Aug 2025 20:35:54 +0200
New blog post
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diff --git a/src/blog/2025-08-16-alpine-declarative/alpine-declarative.md b/src/blog/2025-08-16-alpine-declarative/alpine-declarative.md
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+# Declarative package management with Alpine Linux
+
+It has been almost two months since my last update, and it feels a
+bit weird because I have done plenty of tinkering that would be a
+good fit for this blog! But for one reason or another, I did not
+feel like writing about any of this in the usual level of detail.
+
+However, one of the last things I did is quite simple to explain, so here
+is a short post about it.
+
+## Alpine linux
+
+A couple of days ago I decided to try out
+[Alpine Linux](https://www.alpinelinux.org), a lightweight distro that
+uses [musl libc](https://www.musl-libc.org/) instead of GNU libc and
+[busybox](https://busybox.net) instead of GNU coreutils.
+
+Alpine's package manager is called Alpine Package Keeper (APK, not to
+be confused with Android Package, which also goes by APK). It is very
+fast and simple to use, and it has an especially cool feature: the
+list of all manually installed packages is kept in the plain text file
+`/etc/apk/world`. This file can be edited by hand, and running `apk fix`
+will then add or remove packages to satisfy the list in the file. Neat!
+
+## Declarative package management
+
+Unfortunately, APK will also overwrite `/etc/apk/world` by removing
+empty lines and sorting the packages in alphabetical order, one per
+line. Moreover, there is no option to write comments in this file.
+So one cannot really use it as a (commented) list of the packages they
+want to keep installed.
+
+At first I thought I could keep such a list in a separate file, and write
+a script to parse this file, remove the comments, write the result to
+`/etc/apk/world` and then run `apk fix`.
+
+But then I thought it would be even better to merge the two, and here
+is the result:
+
+```
+#!/bin/sh
+
+# Make a backup copy of the previous /etc/apk/world
+cp /etc/apk/world /etc/apk/world.backup
+
+echo "
+
+# Base system packages (installed by default)
+alpine-base busybox-mdev-openrc doas grub-efi openssh openssl
+
+# Firmware (installed by default, system-dependent)
+linux-firmware-i915 linux-firmware-intel linux-firmware-mediatek linux-firmware-other
+linux-firmware-rtl_bt linux-firmware-rtl_nic linux-firmware-xe linux-lts
+
+# Documentation
+docs mandoc-apropos
+
+# Wifi and other hardware control
+iwd openresolv pciutils bluez
+
+# Audio
+pulseaudio pulseaudio-bluez pulseaudio-alsa alsa-plugins-pulse pulseaudio-utils pulsemixer
+
+# Core tools (non-X)
+coreutils-fmt curl imagemagick ffmpeg tmux ghostscript ncurses shellcheck
+kbd # For console keyboard configuration
+syncthing fzf sfeed yt-dlp mblaze msmtp oath-toolkit
+
+# Development tools
+build-base git gdb valgrind clang20 python3 rust cargo hare
+lowdown darkhttpd # Both used for updating my website
+libx11-dev libxft-dev libxinerama-dev
+
+# Xorg xorg-server
+xinit eudev mesa-dri-gallium xf86-video-intel xf86-input-libinput xf86-input-synaptics
+setxkbmap xsel xbanish xsetroot xwallpaper xev slock
+
+# X applications
+firefox libreoffice telegram-desktop vlc imv-x11
+zathura-djvu zathura-pdf-mupdf zathura-ps
+arandr
+
+# Fonts, but like a gazillion of them
+font-terminus font-noto font-noto-extra font-arabic-misc
+font-misc-cyrillic font-mutt-misc font-screen-cyrillic
+font-winitzki-cyrillic font-cronyx-cyrillic font-noto-arabic
+font-noto-armenian font-noto-cherokee font-noto-devanagari
+font-noto-ethiopic font-noto-georgian font-noto-hebrew font-noto-lao
+font-noto-malayalam font-noto-tamil font-noto-thaana font-noto-thai
+
+" | sed 's/#.*//' | grep -v '^[:space:]*$' > /etc/apk/world
+apk fix
+```
+
+The bulk of the file is a
+[here document](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_document) with a long
+list of all the packages I want installed - Alpine is really minimal! The
+few lines of code above and below this list are there to make a backup a
+copy of the old `/etc/apk/world`, filter out the comment from the new list
+using [sed](../2023-12-03-sed) and [grep](../2023-08-20-grep),
+copy the new list to `/etc/apk/world` and finally run `apk fix`.
+
+Now when I want to add a new piece of software to my system
+I edit this file and then run it as root. A dead simple
+way to do declarative package management - take that,
+[Nix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_(package_manager))!
