Best Government Package Managers

Chocolatey

Chocolatey has the largest online registry of Windows packages. Chocolatey packages encapsulate everything required to manage a particular piece of software into one deployment artifact by wrapping installers, executables, zips, and/or scripts into a compiled package file. Package submissions go through a rigorous moderation review process, including automatic virus scanning. The community repository has a strict policy on malicious and pirated software. Many organizations face the ongoing challenge of deploying and supporting various versions of software. Chocolatey allows organizations to automate and simplify the management of their complex Windows environments. Our customers have experienced a massive reduction in effort, improved speed of deployment, high reliability, and comprehensive reporting. Reduce complexity, save yourself time, and get up to speed on the latest technologies and approaches.

1 Rating

Starting Price: $96 per year

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Homebrew

The missing package manager for macOS (or Linux). The script explains what it will do and then pauses before it does it. Homebrew installs the stuff you need that Apple (or your Linux system) didn’t. Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local (on macOS Intel). Homebrew won’t install files outside its prefix and you can place a Homebrew installation wherever you like. Trivially create your own Homebrew packages. It’s all Git and Ruby underneath, so hack away with the knowledge that you can easily revert your modifications and merge upstream updates. Homebrew formulae are simple Ruby scripts. Homebrew complements macOS (or your Linux system). Install your RubyGems with gem and their dependencies with brew. Homebrew Cask installs macOS apps, fonts and plugins and other non-open source software. Making a cask is as simple as creating a formula.

1 Rating

Starting Price: Free

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Nix

NixOS

Nix is a tool that takes a unique approach to package management and system configuration. Learn how to make reproducible, declarative, and reliable systems. Nix builds packages in isolation from each other. This ensures that they are reproducible and don't have undeclared dependencies, so if a package works on one machine, it will also work on another. Nix makes it trivial to share development and build environments for your projects, regardless of what programming languages and tools you’re using. Nix ensures that installing or upgrading one package cannot break other packages. It allows you to roll back to previous versions and ensures that no package is in an inconsistent state during an upgrade. Nix is a purely functional package manager. This means that it treats packages like values in purely functional programming languages such as Haskell, they are built by functions that don’t have side effects, and they never change after they have been built.

Starting Price: Free

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RPM Package Manager

The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a powerful package management system capable of building computer software from the source into easily distributable packages; installing, updating, and uninstalling packaged software; querying detailed information about the packaged software, whether installed or not; and verifying the integrity of packaged software and resulting software installation. The package’s metadata is stored in the RPM header. The header is a binary data structure that stores single pieces of data in tags. Each tag has a pre-defined meaning and data type. These are not stored in the header itself but need to be known by the code reading the header. In the header, the tags are only referred to by their number. Each tag is either of a plain scalar type or is an array of one of these types. While not enforced by the type system the RPM code assumes that tags belonging together have the same number of entries.

Starting Price: Free

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Cargo

Cargo is the Rust package manager. Cargo downloads your Rust package's dependencies, compiles your packages, makes distributable packages, and uploads them to crates.io, the Rust community’s package registry. You can contribute to this book on GitHub. To get started with Cargo, install Cargo (and Rust) and set up your first crate. The commands will let you interact with Cargo using its command-line interface. A Rust crate is either a library or an executable program, referred to as either a library crate or a binary crate, respectively. Loosely, the term crate may refer to either the source code of the target or to the compiled artifact that the target produces. It may also refer to a compressed package fetched from a registry. Your crates can depend on other libraries from crates.io or other registries, git repositories, or subdirectories on your local file system. You can also temporarily override the location of a dependency.

Starting Price: Free

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Helm

The Linux Foundation

Helm helps you manage Kubernetes applications, Helm charts help you define, install, and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes application. Charts are easy to create, version, share, and publish, so start using Helm and stop the copy-and-paste. Charts describe even the most complex apps, provide repeatable application installation, and serve as a single point of authority. Take the pain out of updates with in-place upgrades and custom hooks. Charts are easy to version, share, and host on public or private servers. Use helm rollback to roll back to an older version of a release with ease. Helm uses a packaging format called charts. A chart is a collection of files that describe a related set of Kubernetes resources. A single chart might be used to deploy something simple, like a memcached pod, or something complex, like a full web app stack with HTTP servers, databases, caches, and so on.

Starting Price: Free

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npm

We're npm, Inc., the company behind Node package manager, the npm Registry, and npm CLI. We offer those to the community for free, but our day job is building and selling useful tools for developers like you. Get started today for free, or step up to npm Pro to enjoy a premium JavaScript development experience, with features like private packages. Bring the best of open source to you, your team, and your company. Relied upon by more than 11 million developers worldwide, npm is committed to making JavaScript development elegant, productive, and safe. The free npm Registry has become the center of JavaScript code sharing, and with more than one million packages, the largest software registry in the world. Our other tools and services take the Registry, and the work you do around it, to the next level. At npm, Inc., we're proud to dedicate teams of full-time employees to operating the npm Registry, enhancing the CLI, improving JavaScript security, and other projects.

Starting Price: $7 per month

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Ninite

You can manage your Windows PCs (Windows 7 and later) in a live web interface with Ninite Pro. Install the lightweight Ninite Agent on your machines and they instantly appear on the web for simple point-and-click management. It's an easy way to get a real-time interactive view of all your machines. The new Ninite Pro lets you manage your software in a live web interface. Each machine is a row and each app is a column. You can select an individual cell to update, install, or uninstall an app on a machine. Or select many cells (or whole rows or columns or everything) to perform bulk actions. You can even watch the agents work in real-time. The agent receives commands and sends back updates over a secure connection to Ninite's servers. This means that a roaming laptop looks and works just like any other machine in the web interface. It also makes it possible to issue install/update/uninstall commands for offline machines and have them be delivered the next time those machines are online.

Starting Price: $35 per month

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NuGet

NuGet is the package manager for .NET. The NuGet client tools provide the ability to produce and consume packages. The NuGet Gallery is the central package repository used by all package authors and consumers. New to NuGet? Start with a walkthrough showing how NuGet powers your .NET development. Browse the thousands of packages that developers like you have created and shared with the .NET community. Want to make your first NuGet package and share it with the community? Start with our walkthrough! The command-line tool, nuget.exe, builds and runs under Mono 3.2+ and can create packages in Mono. Although nuget.exe works fully on Windows, there are known issues with Linux and OS X. The primary source for learning about a package is its listing page on NuGet (or another private feed). Each package page on NuGet includes a description of the package, its version history, and usage statistics.

Starting Price: Free

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Yarn

Yarn is a package manager which doubles down as project manager. Whether you work on one-shot projects or large monorepos, as a hobbyist or an enterprise user, we've got you covered. Split your project into sub-components kept within a single repository. Yarn guarantees that an install that works now will continue to work the same way in the future. Yarn cannot solve all your problems, but it can be the foundation for others to do it. We believe in challenging the status quo. What should the ideal developer experience be like? Yarn is an independent open-source project tied to no company. Your support makes us thrive. Yarn already knows everything there is to know about your dependency tree, it even installs it on the disk for you. So, why is it up to Node to find where your packages are? Instead, it should be the package manager's job to inform the interpreter about the location of the packages on the disk and manage any dependencies between packages and even versions of packages.

Starting Price: Free

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Zypper

SUSE

Zypper is a command-line package manager for installing, updating, and removing packages. It can also be used to manage repositories. Zypper works and behaves as a regular command-line tool. It features subcommands, arguments, and options that can be used to perform specific tasks. Zypper offers several benefits compared to graphical package managers. Being a command-line tool, Zypper is faster in use and light on resources. Zypper actions can be scripted. Zypper can be used on systems that do not have graphical desktop environments. This makes it suitable for use with servers and remote machines. The simplest way to execute Zypper is to type its name, followed by a command. Additionally, you can choose from one or more global options by typing them immediately before the command. Some commands require one or more arguments. Executing subcommands in the Zypper shell, and using global Zypper options are not supported.

Starting Price: Free

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eoPKG

eoPKG is the package manager for the Solus operating system. It is used to manage installed software packages, search for available software, and to apply updates to the system. Change the system root for eoPKG commands. Set username used when connecting to Basic-Auth repositories. Set password used when connecting to Basic-Auth repositories. Enable full debug information and backtraces. Keep bandwidth usage under the specified (numeric) KBs. Disable the use of ANSI escape sequences for colorization by eoPKG. On success, 0 is returned. A non-zero return code signals a failure.

Starting Price: Free

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APT

Distro Tracker Developers

This software lets you follow the evolution of a Debian-based distribution both with email updates and with a comprehensive web interface. Having all the information about packages conveniently available in a single place is particularly interesting for package maintainers, contributors, advanced users, etc.

Starting Price: Free

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Pacman

Pacman is a utility which manages software packages in Linux. It uses simple compressed files as a package format, and maintains a text-based package database (more of a hierarchy), just in case some hand tweaking is necessary. Pacman does not strive to "do everything." It will add, remove and upgrade packages in the system, and it will allow you to query the package database for installed packages, files and owners. It also attempts to handle dependencies automatically and can download packages from a remote server. Version 2.0 of Pacman introduced the ability to sync packages (the - sync option) with a master server through the use of package databases. Prior to this, packages would have to be installed manually using the --add and - upgrade operations.

Starting Price: Free

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Snapcraft

This is the code repository for snapd, the background service that manages and maintains installed snaps. Snaps are app packages for desktop, cloud, and IoT that update automatically. Easy to install, secure, cross-platform, and dependency-free. They're being used on millions of Linux systems every day. Alongside its various service and management functions, snapd provides the snap command that's used to install and remove snaps and interact with the wider snap ecosystem, implements the confinement policies that isolate snaps from the base system and from each other, governs the interfaces that allow snaps to access specific system resources outside of their confinement. If you're looking for something to install, such as Spotify or Visual Studio Code, take a look at the Snap Store. And if you want to build your own snaps, start with our creating a snap documentation.

Starting Price: Free

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Aptitude

Debian

Aptitude is an Ncurses and command-line based front-end to numerous Apt libraries, which are also used by Apt, the default Debian package manager. Aptitude is text-based and run from a terminal. A mutt-like syntax for matching packages in a flexible manner. Mark packages as "automatically installed" or "manually installed" so that packages can be auto-removed when no longer required (feature available in Apt, too, since quite a few Debian releases). Preview of actions about to be taken with different colors marking different actions. The ability to interactively retrieve and display the Debian changelog of all available official packages. Score-based dependency resolver which is more suitable for interactive dependency resolution with additional hints from the user like "I don't want that part of the solution but keep that other part of the solution for your next try". Apt's dependency resolver on the other hand is optimized for good "one-shot" solutions.

Starting Price: Free

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DPKG

Ubuntu

DPKG is a tool to install, build, remove and manage Debian packages. The primary and more user-friendly front-end for DPKG is aptitude. DPKG itself is controlled entirely via command line parameters, which consist of exactly one action and zero or more options. The action parameter tells DPKG what to do and options control the behavior of the action in some way. DPKG can also be used as a front-end to DPKG-deb(1) and DPKG-query. The list of supported actions can be found later on in the actions section. If any such action is encountered DPKG just runs DPKG-deb or DPKG-query with the parameters given to it, but no specific options are currently passed to them, to use any such option the back-ends need to be called directly. DPKG maintains some usable information about available packages. The information is divided into three classes, states, selection states, and flags. These values are intended to be changed mainly with dselect.

Starting Price: Free

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Synaptic

Synaptic is a graphical package management program for apt. It provides the same features as the apt-get command-line utility with a GUI front-end based on Gtk+. Install, remove, upgrade and downgrade single and multiple packages. Upgrade your whole system. Manage package repositories (sources.list). Find packages by name, description, and several other attributes. Select packages by status, section, name, or a custom filter. Sort packages by name, status, size, or version. Browse all available online documentation related to a package. Download the latest changelog of a package. Lock packages to the current version. Force the installation of a specific package version. Undo/Redo selections. Built-in terminal emulator for the package manager. Debian/Ubuntu only, configure packages through the debconf system. Debian/Ubuntu only, Xapain-based fast search (thanks to Enrico Zini).

Starting Price: Free

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PowerShellGet

Microsoft

PowerShellGet is a module with commands for discovering, installing, updating, and publishing PowerShell artifacts like modules, DSC resources, role capabilities, and scripts. The Find-Command cmdlet finds PowerShell commands such as cmdlets, aliases, functions, and workflows. Find-Command searches modules in registered repositories. For each command found by Find-Command, a PSGetCommandInfo object is returned. The PSGetCommandInfo object can be sent down the pipeline to the Install-Module cmdlet. Install-Module installs the module that contains the command. DSC resources can be located using the parameters Tag and RequiredVersion. Tag displays the current version of every resource that contains the specified tag in the repository. RequiredVersion needs the ModuleName parameter and the Name parameter is optional. The Name and ModuleName parameters limit the output. Use the AllVersions parameter to display a DSC resource's available versions.

Starting Price: Free

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Portage

The Portage Development Project works to provide a continuously expanding and developing tool for the management and installation of packages. The developers work on providing a coherent system that is as trouble free as possible (backwards compatible, automated, and simple). Bugs are tracked and fixed from the Gentoo bug tracker and developer-developer correspondence is maintained on the gentoo-portage-dev mailing list. Another communication channel is the #gentoo-portage (webchat) IRC channel on the Libera.Chat network. The goal of the Portage project is to provide a seamless integration of developer and user tools to aid the growth and maintenance of Gentoo packages. This means we work not only on Portage itself, but also on associated tools, and on ensuring that our APIs are useful to other tools.

Starting Price: Free

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Homebrew Cask

Homebrew

A CLI workflow for the administration of macOS applications distributed as binaries. Homebrew Cask extends Homebrew and brings its elegance, simplicity, and speed to the installation and management of GUI macOS applications such as Atom and Google Chrome. We do this by providing a friendly CLI workflow for the administration of macOS applications distributed as binaries. To start using Homebrew Cask, you just need Homebrew installed. Homebrew Cask installs macOS apps, fonts and plugins, and other non-open source software. Homebrew Cask is implemented as part of Homebrew. All Homebrew Cask commands begin with brew, which works for both Casks and Formulae. The command brew install accepts one or multiple Cask tokens. Homebrew Cask comes with bash and zsh completion for the brew command. Since the Homebrew Cask repository is a Homebrew Tap, you’ll pull down the latest Casks every time you issue the regular Homebrew command brew update.

Starting Price: Free

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Scoop

Scoop installs programs you know and love, from the command line with a minimal amount of friction. For terminal applications, Scoop creates shims, a kind of command-line shortcuts, inside the ~\scoop\shims folder, which is accessible in the PATH. For graphical applications, Scoop creates program shortcuts in a dedicated Start menu folder, called 'Scoop Apps'. This way, packages are always cleanly uninstalled and you can be sure what tools are currently in your PATH and in your Start menu.

Starting Price: Free

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pkgsrc

pkgsrc is a framework for managing third-party software on UNIX-like systems, currently containing over 17,900 packages. It is the default package manager of NetBSD and SmartOS and can be used to enable freely available software to be built easily on a large number of other UNIX-like platforms. The binary packages that are produced by pkgsrc can be used without having to compile anything from the source. It can be easily used to complement the software on an existing system. pkgsrc is very versatile and configurable, supporting building packages for an arbitrary installation prefix, allowing multiple branches to coexist on one machine, a build options framework, and a compiler transformation framework, among other advanced features. Unprivileged use and installation are also supported. NetBSD already contains the necessary tools for using pkgsrc; on other platforms, you need to bootstrap pkgsrc to get the package management tools installed.

Starting Price: Free

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MacPorts

The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11, or Aqua-based open-source software on the Mac operating system. To that end, we provide the command-line driven MacPorts software package under a 3-Clause BSD License, and through it easy access to thousands of ports that greatly simplify the task of compiling and installing open-source software on your Mac. We provide a single software tree that attempts to track the latest release of every software title (port) we distribute, without splitting them into “stable” vs. “unstable” branches, targeting mainly macOS Mojave v10.14 and later (including macOS Monterey v12 on both Intel and Apple Silicon). There are thousands of ports in our tree, distributed among different categories, and more are being added on a regular basis.

Starting Price: Free

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RuckZuck

Select a software from the repository and RuckZuck handles the download and installation for you. RuckZuck can detect and update existing software that was not installed with RuckZuck. The RuckZuck repository does not store binaries of the software, just links to where the software is downloaded. Installing software with RuckZuck does not grant you a license for that product. You will be able to provide an E-Mail address if you upload new software, but as soon as the software is approved, the address will be removed from the package. If a product does not provide a URL for automatic download and the license allows redistribution of binaries, RuckZuck will be able to host these files.

Starting Price: Free

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Fink

The Fink project wants to bring the full world of Unix open source software to Darwin and Mac OS X. We modify Unix software so that it compiles and runs on Mac OS X ("port" it) and make it available for download as a coherent distribution. Fink uses Debian tools like dpkg and apt-get to provide powerful binary package management. You can choose whether you want to download precompiled binary packages or build everything from source. The project offers precompiled binary packages as well as a fully automated build-from-source system. Mac OS X includes only a basic set of command-line tools. Fink brings you enhancements for these tools as well as a selection of graphical applications developed for Linux and other Unix variants. With Fink the compile process is fully automated; you'll never have to worry about Makefiles or configure scripts and their parameters again. The dependency system automatically takes care that all required libraries are present.

Starting Price: Free

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Windows Package Manager (winget)

Windows Package Manager

If you are new to the Windows Package Manager, you might want to Explore the Windows Package Manager tool. The packages available to the client are in the Windows Package Manager Community Repository. The client requires Windows 10 1809 (build 17763) or later at this time. Windows Server 2019 is not supported as the Microsoft Store is not available nor are updated dependencies. It may be possible to install on Windows Server 2022, this should be considered experimental (not supported), and requires dependencies to be manually installed as well.

Starting Price: Free

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Conda

Package, dependency, and environment management for any language, Python, R, Ruby, Lua, Scala, Java, JavaScript, C/ C++, Fortran, and more. Conda is an open-source package management system and environment management system that runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, and z/OS. Conda quickly installs, runs, and updates packages and their dependencies. Conda easily creates, saves, loads, and switches between environments on your local computer. It was created for Python programs, but it can package and distribute software for any language. Conda as a package manager helps you find and install packages. If you need a package that requires a different version of Python, you do not need to switch to a different environment manager, because conda is also an environment manager. With just a few commands, you can set up a totally separate environment to run that different version of Python, while continuing to run your usual version of Python in your normal environment.

Starting Price: Free

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MSYS2

MSYS2 is a collection of tools and libraries providing you with an easy-to-use environment for building, installing and running native Windows software. It consists of a command line terminal called mintty, bash, version control systems like git and subversion, tools like tar and awk and even build systems like autotools, all based on a modified version of Cygwin. Despite some of these central parts being based on Cygwin, the main focus of MSYS2 is to provide a build environment for native Windows software and the Cygwin-using parts are kept at a minimum. MSYS2 provides up-to-date native builds for GCC, mingw-w64, CPython, CMake, Meson, OpenSSL, FFmpeg, Rust, Ruby, just to name a few. To provide easy installation of packages and a way to keep them updated it features a package management system called Pacman, which should be familiar to Arch Linux users.

Starting Price: Free

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Rudix

Rudix is a build system target on macOS (formerly known as Mac OS X) with minor support to OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Linux. The build system (also called "ports") provides step-by-step instructions for building third-party software, entirely from source code. Rudix provides more than a pure ports framework, it comes with packages, and precompiled software bundled up in a nice format (files *.pkg) for easy installation on your Mac. If you want to collaborate on the project, visit us at GitHub/rudix-mac or at our mirror at GitLab/rudix. Use the GitHub issue tracker to submit bugs or request features. Similar projects or alternatives to Rudix are Fink, MacPorts, pkgsrc, and Homebrew. Packages are compiled and tested on macOS Big Sur (Version 11, Intel only!), Catalina (Version 10.15) and OS X El Capitan (Version 10.11). Every package is self-contained and has everything it needs to work. The binaries, libraries, and documentation will be installed under /usr/local/.

Starting Price: Free

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Compare the Top Government Package Managers as of October 2024

What are Government Package Managers?

Chocolatey

Homebrew

Nix

RPM Package Manager

Cargo

Helm

npm

Ninite

NuGet

Yarn

Zypper

eoPKG

APT

Pacman

Snapcraft

Aptitude

DPKG

Synaptic

PowerShellGet

Portage

Homebrew Cask

Scoop

pkgsrc

MacPorts

RuckZuck

Fink

Windows Package Manager (winget)

Conda

MSYS2

Rudix