ts-apt

TypeScript library for APT package operations on Debian-based Linux systems. It supports both standard APT binaries and the apt-fast bundled wrapper.

Note

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Features

• Install, remove, and upgrade packages
• Search package repositories
• List installed packages and upgradable packages
• Get package metadata and installed file lists
• Run cache cleanup and autoremove operations
• Use apt-fast when available, with automatic fallback to apt-get
• Structured command execution via pluggable command runners
• Typed error model for validation, availability, and command failures
• Safe locking support for mutating operations and parallelism for read-only operations

Runtime Requirements

• Node.js 24+
• Linux environment with APT tooling available

Installation

npm install ts-apt

Usage

import { createPackageManager } from "ts-apt";

const manager = await createPackageManager(false);

const searchResults = await manager.search(["vim"]);
const installed = await manager.listInstalled();

console.log(searchResults.length, installed.length);

Testing

npm run test:unit
npm run test:integration

Integration tests run against real APT tooling and are slower than unit tests.

API Documentation

Generate API docs:

npm run docs:api

Generated docs are written to docs/api.

Credits

• ilikenwf/apt-fast - Optimized fast APT downloads.
• moll/js-internet-message - RFC compliant parsing of some apt output to avoid brittle string parsing.

Maintainer Notes

Development workflows, CI/release behavior, and repository maintenance guidance are documented in CONTRIBUTING.md. PRs are gated by branch policy checks, and releases are published from main and staging via semantic-release.