Batch updates

nixpkgs-update supports batch updates via the update-list subcommand.

Update-List tutorial

1. Setup hub and give it your GitHub credentials, so it saves an oauth token. This allows nixpkgs-update to query the GitHub API. Alternatively, if you prefer not to install and configure hub, you can manually create a GitHub token with repo and gist scopes. Provide it to nixpkgs-update by exporting it as the GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable (nixpkgs-update reads credentials from the files hub uses but no longer uses hub itself).

2. Clone this repository and build nixpkgs-update:

   git clone https://github.com/ryantm/nixpkgs-update && cd nixpkgs-update
   nix-build
   

3. To test your config, try to update a single package, like this:

   ./result/bin/nixpkgs-update update "pkg oldVer newVer update-page"`
   
   # Example:
   ./result/bin/nixpkgs-update update "tflint 0.15.0 0.15.1 repology.org"`
   

   replacing tflint with the attribute name of the package you actually want to update, and the old version and new version accordingly.

   If this works, you are now setup to hack on nixpkgs-update! If you run it with --pr, it will actually send a pull request, which looks like this: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/82465

4. If you'd like to send a batch of updates, get a list of outdated packages and place them in a packages-to-update.txt file:

./result/bin/nixpkgs-update fetch-repology > packages-to-update.txt

There also exist alternative sources of updates, these include:

• PyPI, the Python Package Index: nixpkgs-update-pypi-releases
• GitHub releases: nixpkgs-update-github-releases

5. Run the tool in batch mode with update-list:

./result/bin/nixpkgs-update update-list