Install a list of Atom packages from a file

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This post is probably not very useful because Atom is being shut down.

Atom comes with apm, the command-line Atom Package Manager. If you’re like me, you like to keep your configuration files in a dotfiles repo, which means that you’d like to keep a list of Atom packages in a file somewhere. How do you do that?

First, you’ll need a file that defines your desired packages. Let’s say you want to install language-c-sharp and seti-ui. In order to do that, make a file that looks like this:

language-csharp
seti-ui

Each line is a package that Atom should install. You can also specify version numbers; for example, language-csharp@0.3.0 is valid.

If you already have some packages installed, you can generate this file with the following shell command:

apm list --installed --bare > my_atom_packages.txt

The call to apm list will display all of your installed packages. The --installed flag only shows packages you’ve installed that aren’t built into Atom, and the --bare flag removes formatting. This might generate a file like this:

language-csharp@0.3.0
seti-ui@0.5.1

If you’re like me, you probably just want to install the latest version of a package, whatever it is. You could write a quick script to do it, or you could use grep to filter out the version information:

apm list --installed --bare | grep '^[^@]\+' -o > my_atom_packages.txt

Once you’ve generated the list of packages you want, it’s time to install them. If your file is called my_atom_packages.txt, you can install it with the --packages-file flag:

apm install --packages-file my_atom_packages.txt

And you’re in business! You can put my_atom_packages.txt in a Git repository or a Dropbox folder and keep your Atom packages in sync.