Table of Contents
Nala is a front-end for libapt-pkg. Specifically we interface using the python-apt api.
Especially for newer users it can be hard to understand what apt is trying to do when installing or upgrading.
We aim to solve this by not showing some redundant messages, formatting the packages better, and using color to show specifically what will happen with a package during and install, removal, or upgrade.
For installation instructions see our wiki page.
Outside of pretty formatting, the number 1 reason to use Nala over apt is parallel downloads.
Nala will download 3 packages at a time per unique mirror in your sources.list file.
This constraint is to limit how hard Nala hits mirrors.
Opening multiple connections to the same mirror is great for speeding up downloading many small packages.
Additionally, we alternate downloads between the available mirrors to improve download speeds even further. If a mirror fails for whatever reason, we just try the next until all defined mirrors are exhausted.
Note: Nala does not use APT for package downloading and verification
Which brings us to our next standout feature, nala fetch.
This command works similar to how most people use netselect and netselect-apt.
nala fetch will check if your distro is either Debian or Ubuntu.
Nala will then go get all the mirrors from the respective master list.
Once done we test the latency and score each mirror.
Nala will choose the fastest 3 mirrors (configurable) and write them to a file.
At the moment fetch will only work on Debian, Ubuntu, and derivatives still tied to the main repos. Such as Pop!_OS
Our last big feature is the nala history command.
If you're familiar with dnf this works much in the same way.
Each Install, Remove, or Upgrade we store in /var/lib/nala/history.json with a unique <ID> number.
At any time you can call nala history to print a summary of every transaction ever made.
You can then further manipulate this with commands such as nala history undo <ID> or nala history redo <ID>.
If there is something in the history file that you don't want you can use the nala history clear <ID> It will remove that entry.
Alternatively, for the clear command, we accept --all which will remove the entire history.
Nala's bash, Zsh, and fish completions are now handled with typer.
There is nothing you need to do but install Nala and restart your shell for them to work.
Nala is mirrored on several sites such as GitHub and even Debian Salsa.
The official repository is https://gitlab.com/volian/nala
We ask that you please go here to report a bug or request a feature.
The other repositories are official, but just mirrors of what is on GitLab.
If you would like to support the project you can donate at the link below.
https://liberapay.com/Volian-Linux
