Pyalpm¶
Pyalpm is a Python module that provides native bindings libalpm to interact with Arch Linux package databases.
Contents:
Basic Usage¶
The easiest way to get access to a pacman database is by means of the handle object. To obtain a handle object, you need to initialize it with a rootdir parameter (i.e., the –root path parameter in pacman) and a database location (i.e., a –dbpath parameter):
from pyalpm import Handle
handle = Handle(".", "/var/lib/pacman")
localdb = handle.get_localdb()
The above code sample will provide you with a localdb object, that you can use to query, for example, package information:
coreutils = localdb.get_pkg("coreutils")
The call to get_pkg will provide you with the package passed as the name (in this case, “coreutils”), you can query information about the package using this reference.
print(coreutils.packager)
# 'John Doe <johndoe@archlinux.org>'
print(coreutils.licenses)
# ['GPL3']
print(coreutils.version)
# '8.30-1'
You can see what other properties belong to the package object by looking at the Package page.
A Handle object can also provide a sync database to you:
import pyalpm
from pyalpm import Handle
handle = Handle('.', '/var/lib/pacman/')
core = handle.register_syncdb("core", pyalpm.SIG_DATABASE)
The parameters required in this case are a database name (“core”) and a flag to indicate the type of PGP level of verification that should be done on the database. You can read more about the second flag in the SIG section of this manual.
A syncdb is similar to a localdb (they are, in fact, both DB objects), but some minor differences such as the installed size being 0 (as the packages are not installed yet) and the download size of packages not being necessarilly 0 (as the packages may have not been downloaded yet).
You can use the syncdb to, for example, search for packages:
core.search("linux.*")
# a bunch of packages with linux in their name
linux = core.get_pkg("linux")
print(linux.download_size)
# around 70 megabytes