Nala for package management

Nala package management

More user-friendly and powerful than APT

Nala is a command line frontend for the APT package manager. It uses the python-apt API instead of the APT libraries to manage packages. The goal of Nala is to provide a clearer and more user-friendly display of the current package inventory as well as the requested actions and their execution. It also intends to speed up package download.

Nala uses many APT commands such as install, remove, purge, update, show, and search. It also implements the history command to see past transactions and allow the user to undo them, and the fetch command that displays a list of the fastest mirror servers to choose from. By default, Nala speeds up downloads by fetching three packets at a time from a server. The limit of three connections per mirror exists to minimize the load on the mirrors.

Use Nala

As of siduction 2022.1.0, Nala is installed automatically and can be used immediately. It is not mandatory to use Nala, you can switch between APT and Nala at will. A look at the manpage man nala should be mandatory. Before using it, we strongly recommend making two changes in the configuration file /etc/nala/nala.conf.

First, we change the value for the auto_remove configuration option to false as shown in the following listing:

# Set to false to disable auto auto-removing
auto_remove = false

Secondly, the value full_upgrade = false, this must be changed to true to automatically perform a full-upgrade.

# Set to true to make full-upgrade the default
full_upgrade = true

The reason for both changes is that siduction is based on GNU Linux debian unstable/sid and this base changes daily and therefore needs to be updated regularly. When upgrading from debian sid, occasionally a situation may arise where significant parts of the system should be removed. With the option auto_remove = true we have no way to research, check and decide for ourselves if or which packages to remove. Even in normal operation packages should not be removed with auto_remove, but only after a visual check.

If in an exceptional case it is necessary to upgrade the system without a full-upgrade, nala can be called with the following command, nala upgrade --no-full.

Commands analogous to APT

Many of the commands known from APT are identical in Nala. By default, Nala always expects confirmation before performing a requested action that changes the system.

• nala update
  Updates the package information of the configured package sources.

• nala install <package>
  Installs the named package into our system.

• nala remove <package>
  Removes the named package from our system.

• nala purge <package> or nala remove --purge <package>
  Removes the named package with its configuration files from our system.

• nala upgrade
  Runs update followed by upgrade. (default setting in /etc/nala/nala.conf file)
  Runs update followed by upgrade --full. (With the above changes in the file /etc/nala/nala.conf)

The user-friendly formatting of the output in the terminal facilitates the overview, as the example shows.
(To gain root privileges, “doas” was used in the command.)

In the first part of the output we get a list of the packages to be installed with the indication of their versions and size. After confirmation, the second part lists the actions performed.

Commands that APT does not include

“fetch” command

The nala fetch command, run without any other options, automatically determines the distribution and release of our installation, searches for the fastest mirror servers, lists them for interactive selection, and, after selecting one or more servers, creates the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nala-sources.list.

The -c, --country option limits the search using the ISO country code. Multiple specifications of the option are allowed.
The --non-free option adds contrib and non-free components to the file.

During download, up to three packages are fetched from the server simultaneously.

“history” command

The nala history command, called without a subcommand, shows a summary of all actions performed with Nala. Each line corresponds to an action and contains the ID, the command, the timestamp, the number of packages changed, and the user who requested the action. Actions performed by other programs are not recorded.

Details about an action from the history are shown by the same command with the attached subcommand info <ID>.

If we now want to undo the installation of “yapf3” with its dependencies, in our case “python3-yapf”, we use the subcommand undo <ID> for this.
(Again, user1 gets root privileges by using “doas”.)

In the first part of the output, we see the packages to be removed with the indication of their versions and size. After confirmation, the second part lists the actions performed.
If we change our mind and want to use the packages again, the nala history redo <ID> command will help us to perform the action again. The nala history clear <ID> command can be used to remove entries from the history, nala history clear --all removes all entries.

In the Nala version 0.11.1 described here, the subcommands undo <ID> and redo <ID> currently only support the actions Install or Remove. In a future version, which will be based on the Rust programming language, it should be possible to roll back complete dist upgrades.