deb-get¶

deb-get installs third-party software on Debian and Ubuntu via .deb packages sourced from GitHub releases, direct URLs, and PPAs.

Note

deb-get wraps apt under the hood for actual package installation and removal, so all operations that modify the system require sudo.

Caution

deb-get list --installed prints bare package names with no versions, so the installed inventory carries no version. search is likewise version-less and offers no exact or extended mode, so mpm refilters its results.

Note

There is no read-only outdated: detection runs deb-get update, which also refreshes the package index, so the probe escalates through sudo like a sync.

Home page: https://github.com/wimpysworld/deb-get
Source: meta_package_manager/managers/deb_get.py

Platforms¶

🐧 Linux

Operations¶

Operation	Supported	Notes
`installed`	✓
`outdated`	✓
`search`	✓	exact and extended search backfilled by `mpm`
`install`	✓
`upgrade`	✓
`upgrade_all`	✓
`remove`	✓
`sync`	✓
`cleanup`	✓

Ecosystem¶

Accepted purl types: pkg:deb-get

Usage¶

$ mpm --deb-get installed
$ mpm --deb-get search "query"
$ mpm --deb-get upgrade --all
$ mpm install pkg:deb-get/hello
$ mpm --dry-run --deb-get upgrade --all

Every example above accepts --dry-run, which simulates the underlying manager calls without touching the system: the safe way to watch what mpm would do before trusting it.

Deselect the manager for a single run with --no-deb-get, disable it from your configuration, or tune its invocation attributes with per-manager overrides.

Command line¶

CLI names, in lookup order: deb-get

The version is extracted from the output of deb-get version with:

r"(?P<version>\d+\.\d+\.\d+)"

Privilege escalation¶

System-wide manager: mpm wraps its privileged operations in sudo out of the box. Instead of letting the tool prompt mid-run, mpm primes the credential cache up-front, with a single branded password prompt at most. Turn escalation off for rootless setups with --no-sudo or the per-manager sudo override.

See privilege escalation for the full policy.

Cooldown¶

State of deb-get’s release-age gating, from the cooldown support table:

Status: ❌ None

With --cooldown set, mpm skips this manager’s install and upgrade operations rather than run them unguarded (fail-closed); --allow-unsupported-managers opts back in.

Reference traces¶

Raw native outputs captured in the manager source: the reference mpm’s parsers were written against. If you know deb-get well and a transcript below looks wrong, or a newer release changed its output format, report it.

$ deb-get list --installed
activitywatch
anydesk
bitwarden
deb-get
freeplane
google-chrome-stable
ipscan
protonvpn
zoom

$ sudo deb-get update
Checking for updates to deb-get installed packages
  [+] ipscan (3.9.2) has an update pending. 3.9.3 is available.