soar

The soar module installs & integrates the soar package manager as an alternative to Homebrew / Linuxbrew.

soar is a package manager, which manages the installation of portable & static binaries. PkgForge’s bincache, pkgforge-cargo & pkgforge-go repos are used by default for the binaries. Other default & external repos that contain AppImages & other similar formats are disabled to make soar focused on CLI binaries only. This is configurable if you wish to have a package manager for GUI applications, see Configuration options.

The repositories with prebuilt binaries use the GitHub Container registry as their backend and all their packages are published there.

Compared to Homebrew / Linuxbrew:

• there are no managed dependencies for packages by design (single package = single binary).
• no conflicting system packages in the repo (like systemd, dbus or similar).
• it’s simpler in design, with respect for Linux folder structuring

For more information, please see the official documentation of soar.

Features

• Downloads & installs soar.
• Sets up systemd timer for auto-upgrading soar packages.
• Sets up shell profile for automatically adding the directory containing soar binaries to PATH.

Repos

To see the useful information about source, reliability, trust & security of all soar repos, including external ones, you can open the links below:

• https://docs.pkgforge.dev/repositories
• https://docs.pkgforge.dev/repositories/external

Local modification

By default, soar utilizes BlueBuild’s config (/usr/share/bluebuild/soar/config.toml).

End-users can use custom a soar configuration by creating it at ~/.config/soar/config.toml, or in a custom directory while making sure to supply it to soar by providing SOAR_CONFIG the environment variable in shell profile. If you specify the custom bin_path directory for soar packages, you also need to export that directory to PATH manually in the shell profile.

Uninstallation

Removing the soar module from the recipe is not enough to get it completely removed. On a booted system, it’s also necessary to run the soar uninstallation script to uninstall config & installed packages in the ${HOME} directory.

Either a local-user can execute this script manually, or the image-maintainer may make it automatic through a custom systemd service.

Uninstallation script

#!/bin/sh
if [ -f "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/soar/config.toml" ]; then
  echo "Removing soar config in '${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/soar/' directory"
  rm -r "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/soar/"
else
  echo "'${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/soar/config.toml' file is already removed"
fi
if [ -d "${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}/soar/" ]; then
  echo "Removing '${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}/soar/' directory"
  rm -r "${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}/soar/"
else
  echo "'${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}/soar/' directory is already removed"
fi

Example configuration

type: soar
additional-repos: true
auto-upgrade: true
upgrade-interval: '3h'

Configuration options

auto-upgrade: (optional boolean)

Whether to auto-upgrade all installed soar packages using a systemd service.

Default: true

upgrade-interval: (optional string)

Defines how often the soar upgrade service should run. The string is passed directly to OnUnitInactiveSec in systemd timer. (Syntax: [‘1d’, ‘6h’, ‘10m’]).

Default: 8h

additional-repos: (optional boolean)

Whether to enable all additional repos, including official soar & external repos like AM, for installing portable AppImages & other similar formats.

Default: false