pkgDB

Utilites to fetch licenses and package metadata for Debian based OSes

I built this tool over a weekend sometime back, because it was difficult to figure out the license information of all packages in Ubuntu in a clean form, and I wanted to experiment with few things. Hope it is useful you, kindly raise a PR or an issue on improvements needed.

pkgDB is a standalone tool that:

• Enables you to fetch ubuntu package and source metadata
• Scrape the net for package licenses
• Populate a databse with the metadata and license information
• A REST API interface to interact with the database

How to use?

To try out the database over a REST interface:

git clone https://github.com/rahulunair/pkgDB && cd pkgDB/scripts
./run_api_server.sh

Database

This tool populates a package database for all packages in Ubuntu along with its sources. The two primary tables available in the database (packages.db) are, sources and binaries.

Let’s see some sample output of these tables

Binaries

The binaries table like the name suggests has all the metadata information regarding a package that can be installed on Ubuntu using apt.

As you can see, it shows the package name, version, os name, version, package license etc. The full list of columns is given below:

columns
name
version
source
maintainer
homepage
sha1
sha256
pkg_zip
os_name
os_version
license

Sources

The sources table like the name suggests has all the metadata information regarding a source package for a binary that can be installedon Ubuntu using apt.

As you can see, it shows the source package name, version, binary packages associated with the source, os name, version, package license etc. The full list of columns is given below:

columns
name
version
binaries
source_url
maintainer
homepage
sha1
sha256
pkg_zip
os_name
os_version
license

REST API

The tool has a REST API that can be used to interface with the database, the scripts directory has a bash script to set up a local packages db to query the database.

• Run a RESTAPI server to interface with the packages.db (../src/pkgDB/data/db/packages.db)

git clone https://github.com/rahulunair/pkgDB && cd pkgDB/scripts
./run_api_server.sh

INFO:     Started server process [1533052]
INFO:     Waiting for application startup.
INFO:     Tortoise-ORM startup
    connections: {'default': {'engine': 'tortoise.backends.sqlite', 'credentials': {'journal_mode': 'WAL', 'journal_size_limit': 16384, 'file_path': 'data/db/packages.db'}}}
    apps: {'models': {'models': ['models'], 'default_connection': 'default'}}
INFO:     Tortoise-ORM started, {'default': <tortoise.backends.sqlite.client.SqliteClient object at 0x7fd804c48b20>}, {'models': {'Binaries': <class 'models.Binaries'>, 'Sources': <class 'models.Sources'>}}
INFO:     Application startup complete.
INFO:     Uvicorn running on http://127.0.0.1:8000 (Press CTRL+C to quit)

Contributions

This is an OSS tool, any contribution is welcome as long as it is benificial to the community as a whole.