pkg.bot

pkg.bot is a fast search engine for Linux packages across distributions and package repositories. It uses the package data dump from Repology.

In early September 2026, I had just switched to NixOS. In the process of setting it up, I was frequently searching for packages on the official package site, but was quite annoyed by its clunky UX. No way to sort by date or versions, no "permalink" to share a package's page even.

I remembered that pretty much most distros have clunky, annoying package sites. So I built this.

The search engine is a statically compiled Rust program which uses a single SQLite DB as its data source. It has a built-in Repology Postgres dump importer.

Features

• Super-fast search, filtering, and querying
• Good UX (subjective) and accessibility
• Sort and filter across various parameters
• Filter on recency, eg: version > 2.0 and updated > 2026-01-01
• RSS feeds for search, filtering, and individual packages

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Usage

• Download the latest compiled binary from the releases page or clone this repo and run make build.
• ./pkgbot new-config to generate a new config file (config.toml by default)
• Edit config.toml
• ./pkgbot install to generate a new SQLite DB (data.db by default)
• ./pkgbot --site=./site to run the web search engine. ./site is the theme directory cloned from this repo.

API

See API docs.

Importing data from repology

Download the latest .sql.zst dump from https://dumps.repology.org, then restore it into a fresh Postgres database:

set -o pipefail
wget https://dumps.repology.org/repology-database-dump-latest.sql.zst
docker compose up --build -d --wait db

# Instead of loading the entire .sql dump directly into the DB
# use the built-in loader that streams only the tables required by pkgbot.
zstd -dc repology-database-dump-latest.sql.zst | ./pkgbot restore-repology

# Create a new data.db and import data from PG into it.
./pkgbot install
./pkgbot import

License: AGPL