Package Manager Manager

The time when one package manager was all you needed is long gone. pkg⋅mgr² inventories your package managers and their packages, so you can see what you have, what’s outdated, and what’s taking up space.

Use whatever you want without compromising visibility into what’s going on.

Tip

No need to remember to npx ***@latest anymore. We update npx’d stuff too.

Quickstart

brew install --cask mxcl/made/package-manager-manager

No brew? Download the .dmg from ./releases/.

 

Manage Your Other Macs

pkg⋅mgr² can update and uninstall packages on any Mac you already reach over SSH, including Macs on your local network or Tailscale network.

1. Install Package Manager Manager in /Applications on each Mac.

2. Make sure SSH works non-interactively and the host key is trusted:

   ssh pangolin true

3. Choose Package Manager Manager → Add / Edit Hosts… and add the SSH host or an alias from ~/.ssh/config.

Each Mac gets its own Installed and Outdated sections in the sidebar. You can update one package, update everything outdated, or uninstall a package from the remote Mac.

pkg⋅mgr² uses OpenSSH directly. Your keys, agent, host aliases, and known_hosts stay where they already live; the app stores no SSH credentials.

What It Finds

pkg⋅mgr² currently inventories:

• Homebrew formulae and casks
• tools and runtimes installed with mise
• global npm packages
• npx cache entries
• Skills packages installed with skills or npx skills
• uv tool tools and uv Python installs
• uvx cached environments
• cargo install binaries
• rustup and installed Rust toolchains

It also pulls package summaries, categories, URLs, and latest-version metadata where the project has a source for it. If metadata is missing, the package still shows up. It just looks less informed.

Adding New Package Managers

Get your agent to add new package managers and give us a PR.

Note

We want to support everything! Yes! Everything!

Instructions to Agents

Keep new manager support boring and off the main thread. The menu bar helper runs PackageScanner.inventory(database:) in the background, writes a PackageHostSnapshot, and the main app renders that snapshot. Do not add package manager scans, network loads, or shell commands to SwiftUI views or main-window models.

Checklist:

• Add the manager to PackageManagerKind in Sources/PMMCore/Models.swift.
• Add one scanX(database:) method to Sources/PMMCore/PackageScanner.swift and call it from inventory(database:). Return [] when the tool is missing or the manager has no local state.
• Build ManagedPackage values with stable identifier prefixes, readable displayName, installedVersion, optional latestVersion, and install or binary paths when cheap to find.
• Wire update/uninstall only when the native command is obvious: PackageUpdater, PackageUninstaller, and their supports(_:) methods. Inventory-only support is fine.
• Put the manager in a sidebar group in MainWindowModel.swift and give it a dashboard SF Symbol in MainWindowDashboardView.swift.
• Map it in PackageDossierClient.provider(for:) only if AutomIC Vault has a matching provider.
• Update the README lists under "What It Finds" and "Updating and Removing".
• Add focused tests beside the touched code: scanner parsing in PackageScannerTests, action commands in PackageUpdaterTests or PackageUninstallerTests, and UI grouping in MainWindowModelTests when a new section changes.

Updating the Discover Feed

The hosted feed is generated by one reentrant command:

./scripts/update-discover-feed

An automation should keep following the command's status until it finishes:

• PMM_FEED_STATUS=NEEDS_AGENT — follow the printed research prompt, write .feed-work/response.json, then run the same command again.
• PMM_FEED_STATUS=COMMITTED — the validated feed was committed; push the commit normally to publish it through GitHub Pages.
• PMM_FEED_STATUS=NOOP — no new packages, stale recommendations, or due editorial need work.
• PMM_FEED_STATUS=ERROR — correct the reported response problem and rerun; the previous feed remains untouched.

Use ./scripts/update-discover-feed --check to validate the checked-in feed without network access and --self-test to exercise the complete handoff and commit flow with fixtures.

The generator publishes two contracts. www/feed/v1.json remains the rolling compatibility snapshot. www/feed/v2.json is the newest page of an append-only archive: every editorial, new-package shelf, recently-updated shelf, and materially changed recommendation shelf is kept as a self-contained block. Each editorial publication is followed by For You, New Packages, and Recently Updated snapshots before the next story. For You snapshots contain at most ten cards and rotate through the 24-card recommendation pool across later sections. Recently Updated does the same in five-card rows. A page holds at most 20 blocks; when it fills, the generator freezes it under www/feed/v2/pages/ and links to it with nextPageURL. Clients can therefore load older pages as the human scrolls without needing historical package dictionaries or a server.

Editorial bodies contain 600–1,000 words of Markdown with at least three ## subheadings. Each editorial also carries two to four related package cards, including its primary package, so the reader ends with working Details and Install actions rather than a dead end.

Feed v2 is script-owned. Do not rewrite frozen pages, IDs, package metadata, or install URLs by hand. A normal feed commit may contain www/feed/v1.json, www/feed/v2.json, new files below www/feed/v2/pages/, and referenced artwork.

Caveats

pkg⋅mgr² shells out to your package managers. It does not replace them, normalize their data perfectly, or pretend their caches are a coherent database.

Homebrew metadata requires brew update in the helper refresh path. Network metadata is best-effort; local inventory should still work when that data is unavailable.

Remote management requires a compatible version of Package Manager Manager in /Applications on the other Mac. Interactive SSH passwords and first-connection host-key prompts are not supported inside the app; connect once in Terminal before adding the host.