Foundry

Foundry is a unified package manager providing both a graphical interface and a command-line interface for managing Flatpak, Pacman, AUR, AppImage, and custom package sources.

Requirements

Build:

• Qt 6.5+ (Core, Gui, Widgets, Quick, QuickControls2, ShaderTools, Concurrent, Network, DBus, Svg)
• CMake (>= 3.19)
• C++20 compiler

Runtime, all optional — a source that is not installed is simply inactive:

• flatpak for the Flatpak source
• pacman for the Pacman source, plus pacman-contrib for checkupdates (without it no Pacman updates are reported) and a PolicyKit authentication agent for installing and removing packages
• paru or yay for the AUR source
• update-desktop-database (desktop-file-utils) for AppImage desktop integration

Installation

Arch Linux / AUR

Foundry is available on the AUR:

# Release (builds from source)
paru -S astra-foundry
# or yay -S astra-foundry

# Precompiled binary (fast install)
paru -S astra-foundry-bin
# or yay -S astra-foundry-bin

# Latest git development
paru -S astra-foundry-git
# or yay -S astra-foundry-git

Manual Installation (From Source)

Build and install Foundry system-wide:

mkdir -p build
cmake -B build -S . -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build
sudo cmake --install build

This installs the astra binary to /usr/bin, the desktop launcher to /usr/share/applications/astra.desktop, and the application icon to /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/astra-foundry.svg.

Running the GUI

Launch the graphical marketplace interface:

./build/foundry --gui

or:

./build/foundry -g

Using the CLI

Search across enabled package sources:

foundry search <query>
foundry search <query> --source <Flatpak|Pacman|AUR|AppImage>
foundry search <query> --json

When no --source is given, the source is resolved from the package id: an ambiguous id lists the sources that provide it, so foundry install yay --source AUR picks the AUR package rather than the repository one.

Install a package:

foundry install <package-id>
foundry install <package-id> --source <source>
foundry install <package-id> --source Flatpak --scope <user|system>

Uninstall a package:

foundry remove <package-id>
foundry remove <package-id> --source <source>

List installed packages:

foundry list

List available updates:

foundry update
foundry update --json

Apply updates, either everything or a single package:

foundry upgrade
foundry upgrade <package-id>

View package details:

foundry info <package-id>
foundry info <package-id> --source <source>

List active package sources and plugins:

foundry sources

Show help and all available commands:

foundry --help

Output is coloured only when it goes to a terminal; --no-color and NO_COLOR disable it, and --json prints machine readable output for search, list, update, info and sources.

Completions for bash, zsh and fish are installed alongside the binary.

Privileges

Pacman operations are executed through pkexec, so they are authorised by PolicyKit. The shipped action com.astra-foundry.pacman.update uses the standard defaults: administrator authentication is required, and the authorisation is kept for the rest of the session (auth_admin_keep) so a full update does not ask repeatedly.

A PolicyKit authentication agent has to be running for these operations; without one pkexec cannot ask for credentials. Flatpak (--user) and AppImage operations do not require any elevated privileges.

Versions up to 1.1.0 also installed /usr/share/polkit-1/rules.d/10-astramarket-pacman.rules, which allowed every member of the wheel group to run pacman through pkexec without authenticating. That file is no longer shipped and should be removed from existing installations:

sudo rm -f /usr/share/polkit-1/rules.d/10-astramarket-pacman.rules

Plugins

For creating and installing custom package sources or scrapers, see PLUGINS.

Translations

The interface is translatable and ships with German. Translation files live in translations/ and are compiled into the binary when the Qt Linguist tools are available (qt6-tools on Arch); without them the build falls back to English. The language is picked from the system locale at startup.

Refresh the strings after changing the UI:

cmake --build build --target update_translations

To add a language, copy translations/foundry_de.ts to translations/foundry_<code>.ts, add it to the qt_add_translations() call in CMakeLists.txt and translate it with Qt Linguist.

Contributing

Build instructions, the test setup and the code style are described in CONTRIBUTING.

Acknowledgements

• UI design language, tokens, and components adapted from Caelestia Shell.
• Material Design icons and shape specifications by Google.

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL-3.0). See the LICENSE file for details.