elget --- A command line interface for El-Get

elget is a command line interface for El-Get. You can install/update packages by running commands as you do M-x el-get-install or M-x el-get-update on Emacs. It also supports package version locks provided by el-get-lock.

Installation

cd ~ && git clone https://github.com/tarao/el-get-cli .el-get-cli
export PATH="$HOME/.el-get-cli/bin:$PATH"

Usage

To use the following commands, you need El-Get to be installed and initialized in your Emacs init file.

• elget OPTIONS install [PACKAGES ...]

  Install specified packages. Without packages, it runs an ordinary install sequence according to instructions in your Emacs init file.

• elget OPTIONS update [PACKAGES ...]

  Update specified packages to the latest versions of their remote source. Without packages, it updates all the installed packages.

To use the following commands, you need el-get-lock to be installed and initialized in your Emacs init file.

• elget OPTIONS lock [PACKAGES ...]

  Lock specified packages. Without packages, it resets the lock status to lock the all installed packages.

• elget OPTIONS unlock [PACKAGES ...]

  Unlock specified packages. Without packages, it resets the lock status to unlock the all installed packages.

• elget OPTIONS checkout [PACKAGES ...]

  Checkout the locked versions of specified packages. Without packages, it checks out all the installed packages.

Options

• -f <file>

  Specify an Emacs init file.

Environment variables

• EMACS

  Specify the location of Emacs binary.

Tips: isolating your Emacs init file from the default directory

By -f option, you can specify an Emacs init file to initialize El-Get. This helps you to try elget with a local Emacs init file other than the default ~/.emacs.d/init.el but the El-Get package installation directory is still ~/.emacs.d/el-get by default.

To get the El-Get installation directory isolated from the default one, put the following code in your (local) Emacs init file (before the initialization of El-Get).

(when load-file-name
  (setq user-emacs-directory (file-name-directory load-file-name)))

This changes the user Emacs directory (~/.emacs.d by default) to the directory where the (local) Emacs init file is located so that El-Get will chooose the package directory under this directory. For example, if you (local) Emacs init file is ~/el-get-test/init.el, then the El-Get package directory will be ~/el-get-test/el-get.

Actually, setting user-emacs-directory at the beginning of the user Emacs file will maintain all the well-written Emacs Lisp packages that use the user Emacs directory. So you should always do this to make you init file portable.

To run your Emacs with the local Emacs init file, run the following command.

emacs -q -l YOUR-LOCAL-INIT-FILE.el