Topgrade - Command Line Tool to Upgrade All Packages on Linux

In this guide, we're going to explore an interesting tool that aims at making updates of everything installed on your system as easy as just running one command. This software is topgrade, it detects the tools you use on your system and run appropriate package manager to update packages.

On RHEL family Linux distributions like CentOS, topgrade will execute the yum upgradecommand, this is dnf upgrade for Fedora. On Debian family, the equivalent command executed by topgrade to ensure everything is up to date is apt update && apt dist-upgrade. On Arch Linux, it will use run yay or fall back to pacman if yay is not installed.

If you don't have yay AUR helper installed on Arch Linux, install it by cloning the PKGBUILD and building with makepkg.

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
cd yay
makepkg -si

By just running a single topgrade command, it will also do an update of the following:

Upgrade Atom packages
Update Flatpak packages on Linux
Update snap packages on Linux
Run fwupdmgr to show firmware upgrade.
Upgrade Emacs packages
Run Cargo install-update
Run.brew update && brew upgrade. This should handle both Homebrew and Linuxbrew on Unix.
Run zplug update on Unix
Unix: Run fisherman update
Upgrade tmux plugins with TPM
Upgrade Vim/Neovim packages.

Installing topgrade on Linux

Installation of topgrade on Linux can be done by pulling a pre-compiled binary file or using cargo install. If you are running Arch Linux as your primary operating system, you can install topgrade from AUR:

$ yaourt -S topgrade

For all other Operating systems, navigate to topgrade releases page and download the latest release. As of this writing, the latest release is v0.9.0

$ export ver="v0.9.0"
$ wget https://github.com/r-darwish/topgrade/releases/download/${ver}/topgrade-${ver}-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz

For macOS users, download the package with the name apple-darwin.tar.gz

Uncompress the package to get the binary file:

$ tar xvf topgrade-${ver}x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz

Move extracted binary to /usr/local/bin

$ sudo mv topgrade /usr/local/bin/

Confirm topgrade binary location:

$ which topgrade
/usr/local/bin/topgrade

Using topgrade to update system packages

Once the package has been installed, you can easily use it by invoking the name on the terminal:

$ topgrade --help
Topgrade 0.9.0
Upgrade all the things

USAGE:
topgrade [FLAGS]

FLAGS:
-h, --help Prints help information
-t, --tmux Invoke inside tmux
-V, --version Prints version information

Simply type topgrade on your terminal and it will start updating and upgrading installed packages.

$ topgrade

If sudo privileges are required, you will be prompted for sudo password. Since I have oh-my-zsh it was also updated.

Running topgrade in a tmux session

It is recommended to leave topgrade running in tmux session to avoid accidental human interruption or network timeouts, especially when working on a remote system. For this use:

$ topgrade -t

If you don't have tmux installed, you can get it using your OS package manager:

On Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install tmux

On CentOS / Fedora:

$ sudo yum install tmux
$ sudo dnf install tmux

On Arch Linux, use:

$ sudo pacman -S tmux

Customizing topgrade

You can place a configuration file at ~/.config/topgrade.toml. Here's an example:

git_repos = [
    "~/dev/topgrade",
]

[pre_commands]
"Emacs Snapshot" = "rm -rf ~/.emacs.d/elpa.bak && cp -rl ~/.emacs.d/elpa ~/.emacs.d/elpa.bak"

[commands]
"Python Environment" = "~/dev/.env/bin/pip install -i https://pypi.python.org/simple -U --upgrade-strategy eager jupyter"