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May 12

Package management for your home directory with stow

I sometimes run into the problem that I work on a computer (via ssh) which does not have all the tools and libraries installed that I want to use. In the past I went on and compiled all I needed manually and installed them into ~/opt.

Problem: you don’t have any kind of package management for the stuff you installed into ~/opt.

Solution: GNU stow

GNU Stow is a symlink farm manager which takes distinct packages of software and/or data located in separate directories on the filesystem, and makes them appear to be installed in the same place.

With stow you install each piece of software into a different directory and you use stow to create symlinks.

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