Skip to content

This document is a WORK IN PROGRESS.
This is just a quick personal cheat sheet: treat its contents with caution!

eix

eix is a set of utilities for searching and diffing local ebuild repositories using a binary cache. It is made to be more efficient and flexible than the $ emerge --search command.

Reference(s)

Table of contents

Install

# emerge -a app-portage/eix

After the installation has finished, it is important to update the cache to index all packages on the system. Running following command will update the local eix cache: 

# eix-update

Config

  • Available configuration files:

    • /etc/eix-sync.conf: stores commands and configurations for eix-sync.
    • /etc/eixrc: eix's global configuration file.
    • ~/.eixrc: eix's per-user configuration file.

  • Available environment variables:

    • EIXRC: If this variable can set a new location for eix's global configuration file (see above).
    • EIX_SYNC_OPTS, EIX_SYNC_CONF, EIX_REMOTE_OPTS, EIX_LAYMAN_OPTS, EIX_TEST_OBSOLETE_OPTS: Security relevant variables (see the man page for more details).

Auto-update eix cache

After each update of the Portage tree the eix cache needs to be updated. Here is how to update it automatically:

Create the following script, allowing to run all executable scripts in the /etc/portage/repo.postsync.d/ directory, after each sync: 

# vi /etc/portage/repo.postsync.d/eix
    > #!/usr/bin/env bash
    > if [[ -e /var/cache/eix/portage.eix ]]; then
    >     cp -a /var/cache/eix/portage.eix /var/cache/eix/previous.eix;
    > fi
    > eix-update
    > if [[ -e /var/cache/eix/previous.eix ]]; then
    >     eix-diff;
    > fi

# chmod +x /etc/portage/repo.postsync.d/eix

If additional ebuild repositories are used, eix-update can become quite slow, as many of them do not provide pre-generated caches. To speed up the process of eix-update, one can hook portage to regenerate the cache for each repository after each sync. An example for this is provided in the /etc/portage/repo.postsync.d/example file. This example can be copied to /etc/portage/repo.postsync.d/egencache and made executable. Note the --jobs argument to egencache: setting this to the output of nproc (as shown below) causes it to use all available system cores. If less impact is desired, of course this can be reduced to a smaller number. 

# vi /etc/portage/repo.postsync.d/egencache
    > #!/bin/sh
    >
    > # The repository name.
    > repository_name=${1}
    > # The URI to which the repository was synced.
    > sync_uri=${2}
    > # The path to the repository.
    > repository_path=${3}
    >
    > # Portage assumes that a hook succeeded if it exits with 0 code. If no
    > # explicit exit is done, the exit code is the exit code of last spawned
    > # command. Since our script is a bit more complex, we want to control
    > # the exit code explicitly.
    > ret=0
    >
    > if [ -n "${repository_name}" ]; then
    >         # Repository name was provided, so we're in a post-repository hook.
    >         echo "* In post-repository hook for ${repository_name}"
    >         echo "** synced from remote repository ${sync_uri}"
    >         echo "** synced into ${repository_path}"
    >
    >         # Gentoo comes with pregenerated cache but the other repositories
    >         # usually don't. Generate them to improve performance.
    >         if [ "${repository_name}" != "gentoo" ]; then
    >                 if ! egencache --update --repo="${repository_name}" --jobs=$(nproc)
    >                 then
    >                         echo "! ! ! egencache failed!"
    >                         ret=1
    >                 fi
    >         fi
    > fi
    >
    > # Return explicit status.
    > exit "${ret}"

# chmod +x /etc/portage/repo.postsync.d/egencache

Allow search all overlays (not only installed ones)

Fetch the caches of the most popular overlays and store them locally (by default it fetches eix caches from http://gpo.zugaina.org): 

# eix-remote update

To have the above command be run automatically on each eix-sync, a solution is to use a post-sync hook: 

$ sudo vi /etc/portage/repo.postsync.d/eix
    > #!/usr/bin/env bash
    > if [[ -e /var/cache/eix/portage.eix ]]; then
    >     cp -a /var/cache/eix/portage.eix /var/cache/eix/previous.eix;
    > fi
    > eix-update
    > if [[ -e /var/cache/eix/previous.eix ]]; then
    >     eix-diff;
    > fi
  + > eix-remote update

After that you will be able to search all overlays (not only installed ones) using -R option, e.g. lets search for the Neovim text editor: 

$ eix -R neovim

Use

  • Search for installed packages (e.g. kernel package): 

    $ eix -I kernel

  • Search in package descriptions (e.g. for browser): 

    $ eix -S browser

  • Search in package descriptions (e.g. for browser) with more compact results: 

    $ eix -S -c browser

  • Search in package categories (e.g. for for connman in the net-misc category): 

    $ eix -C net-misc connman

  • Search by license (e.g. for the End-User License Agreement - EULA): 

    $ eix -L "EULA"

  • Search by excluding results (e.g. excluding the EULA license from the search): 

    $ eix --not -L "EULA"

  • Search for installed obsolete packages on the system 

    $ eix-test-obsolete

If this cheat sheet has been useful to you, then please consider leaving a star here.