Pacstall

AUR-inspired, source-based package manager for Ubuntu and other Linux distributions.

Pacstall builds packages from “pacscripts” and installs the results as .deb archives through dpkg. mpm forces NO_COLOR and DISABLE_PROMPTS so output is uncolored and every call stays non-interactive.

Note

Listing installed packages is a two-step probe: piped --list prints bare names with no versions, so mpm follows each with a --cache-info <pkg> version call to recover its version.

Note

--search matches names only and reports no versions. There is no per-package upgrade verb either, so upgrading one package reinstalls it through --install.

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outdated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:pacstall

Usage

$ mpm --pacstall installed
$ mpm --pacstall search "query"
$ mpm --pacstall upgrade --all
$ mpm install pkg:pacstall/hello
$ mpm --dry-run --pacstall 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-pacstall, disable it from your configuration, or tune its invocation attributes with per-manager overrides.

Command line

  • CLI names, in lookup order: pacstall

  • Environment forced on each call:

    • DISABLE_PROMPTS=1

    • NO_COLOR=1

The version is probed by running:

$ pacstall --version
6.3.7 Vanilla

and extracted with:

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

Privilege escalation

mpm runs this manager as the current user and never prepends sudo by default. Flip the policy for its privileged operations with --sudo or the per-manager sudo override.

See privilege escalation for the full policy.

Cooldown

State of Pacstall’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 Pacstall well and a transcript below looks wrong, or a newer release changed its output format, report it.

$ pacstall --list
neofetch
neovim

$ pacstall --list-upgrades
Upgradable: 2
    neofetch @ pacstall-programs#master ( 7.1.0-2 -> 7.2.0-1 )
    neovim @ pacstall-programs#master ( 0.9.4-1 -> 0.10.0-1 )