Spine

Spine is a meta package manager for most *nix systems. It discovers installed package managers and runs update-oriented workflows in parallel with either a lightweight TUI or script-friendly CLI output.

Features

• Auto-detects common system and developer package managers
• Parallel check, upgrade, and cleanup workflows
• TUI with manager selection, live stdout/stderr output, status colors, and elapsed time
• CLI mode for scripts or headless environments
• Safer cleanup: cleanup is explicit via spn cleanup, spn --cleanup, or config
• Configurable via TOML, including profiles, timeouts, shell mode, and enabled managers
• Shell-aware command execution for pipes, variables, and command substitution
• Dry-run/plan output for previewing commands before they run
• Run history stored as JSON under ~/.local/state/spine/history

Install

git clone https://github.com/plyght/spine.git
cd spine
cargo build --release
sudo cp target/release/spn /usr/local/bin/

Usage

# Open the TUI and upgrade all detected managers
spn
spn upgrade

# Run without the TUI
spn cli
spn --no-tui

# Check for available updates without upgrading
spn check

# Run only cleanup commands
spn cleanup

# Upgrade, then run cleanup commands
spn --cleanup
spn upgrade --cleanup

# Preview detected managers and commands
spn --dry-run
spn check --dry-run
spn cleanup --dry-run

# Check configuration, detection, profiles, and search paths
spn doctor

# List detected managers
spn list

# Run only specific managers
spn --only brew,nix

# Skip specific managers
spn --skip snap

# Use a configured profile
spn --profile dev
spn check --profile system

# Keep going even if one manager fails
spn --continue-on-error

# Config helpers
spn config init
spn config path
spn config edit

# History
spn history
spn history last

Configuration

Spine reads backbone.toml from:

• platform config dir (~/.config/spine/backbone.toml on most Linux, ~/Library/Application Support/spine/backbone.toml on macOS)
• current directory
• ~/.spine/backbone.toml
• binary directory
• /etc/spine/backbone.toml
• /usr/local/etc/spine/backbone.toml

Example:

[settings]
timeout_seconds = 3600
continue_on_error = false
cleanup_after_upgrade = false
shell = true

[profiles.dev]
only = ["brew", "cargo", "npm", "pnpm"]

[managers.brew]
name = "Homebrew"
check_command = "brew --version"
check_updates = "brew outdated"
refresh = "brew update"
upgrade_all = "brew upgrade"
cleanup = "brew cleanup"
requires_sudo = false
enabled = true

Manager fields

Field	Required	Description
name	yes	Human-readable manager name
check_command	yes	Command used to detect whether the manager is installed
enabled	no	Set to false to disable a manager permanently
check_updates	no	Command used by spn check
refresh	no	Command run before upgrade
upgrade_all	no	Command used by upgrade workflows
cleanup	no	Command used by cleanup workflows
requires_sudo	no	Whether Spine should prime sudo before running privileged workflows
timeout_seconds	no	Per-manager timeout override
shell	no	Per-manager shell execution override

Development

cargo build
cargo test

License

MIT