Baulk - Minimal Package Manager for Windows

简体中文

Baulk is a minimalist, portable package manager for Windows.

Why Baulk

Baulk was originally born to solve the inefficiency of the package manager command devi of Clangbuilder, and devi is based on Powershell, and the poor performance is self-evident.

In May 2020, when Microsoft announced the Windows Package Manager Preview, Baulk had been in development for several months. It did not mean that winget appeared, and similar tools would not develop. In addition, Baulk is better than package managers such as winget/scoop in terms of portability, isolation, virtual environment, and zero dependencies on tools. These are the reasons for its existence.

Features

• Core feature is of course the package management function, which is portable and free of installation. All packages, whether msi/exe or other archives, will be decompressed by Baulk to the root directory of the package itself.
• Environment isolation and virtual environment
  • All packages have their own directory, and the invocation of the program in the package is initiated through its launcher or symbolic link, and the environment variables do not interfere or affect.
  • There are different major versions of the same software, and different distributions can be switched through venv, such as openjdk/msjdk.
• Excellent package extraction experience: Baulk itself provides decompression capabilities in zip/tar and other formats, supports automatic detection of filename encoding, and avoids garbled filenames caused by CodePage.
  • Baulk also provides baulk extract/unzip/untar commands for users to use baulk's decompression function in other scenarios.
  • Baulk also provides Unscrew Extractor (unscrew) a minimalist graphical decompression tool that can be integrated into the right-click menu to provide the ability to decompress tar.* files with one click.
• Limited compatibility with scoop manifest (compatibility mode, inability to use baulk advanced features like environment isolation and virtual environments).
• Written in pure C++20 with superior performance.
• IntelliSense network settings when downloading packages.
• Supports updating buckets using github-archives or git.
• Baulk also provides the baulk brand command to detect operating system information.

Get Started

We can go to Github Release to download the latest version：https://github.com/baulk/baulk/releases/latest, If in doubt, refer to the table below.

Installation Mode	x64	arm64	Remark
Completely Portable	Baulk-${VERSION}-win-x64.zip	Baulk-${VERSION}-win-arm64.zip	Unzip it to any directory and double-click baulk-terminal.exe (you can also create a shortcut for it)
Installation without administrator rights	BaulkUserSetup-x64.exe	BaulkUserSetup-arm64.exe	Double click to run the installer
Install with administrator privileges	BaulkSetup-x64.exe	BaulkSetup-arm64.exe	Double click to run the installer
Experimental Experience Appx	Baulk-x64.appx	Baulk-arm64.appx	baulk version > 4.0

Once installed you can experience Baulk:

# Install any packages you need
# baulk i neovim curl wget ripgrep belautils
baulk install neovim curl wget ripgrep belautils
# Now you can run commands like curl in Windows Terminal 
curl -V
# update metadata (bucket)
# baulk u --> baulk update && baulk upgrade
baulk update
# upgrade package
baulk upgrade
# uninstall package
# baulk r wget
baulk uninstall wget

Look, it's so simple!

Search package:

Integration into Windows Terminal (shell replacement)：

Changelog

Changelog

Baulk tools usage

Usually you can run baulk -h to see help for commands (other commands are also -h), you can also see：Detailed Help

Advanced Experience with Baulk

Other Baulk Tools

Barrels - Baulk environment dock (Windows 11 22H2 or Later)

Build Baulk

• Visual Studio 2022 (17.2 or later)
• Windows SDK 10.0.22000.0
• CMake 3.22.0 or Later

git clone https://github.com/baulk/baulk.git
cd baulk
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -GNinja ..
ninja all

Article

《Baulk - 开发一个简单的包管理工具历程》

Thanks

Baulk depends many license-friendly open source projects, I would like to express my sincere gratitude.

• Bela - Modern C++ development experience
• Ppmd - Extract ZIP-Ppmd
• Brotli - Extract tar.br and ZIP-Brotli
• bzip2 - Extract tar.bz and ZIP-bzip2
• Compact Encoding Detection - zip non-UTF-8 file name encoding detection
• zlib (Chromium variants) - Extract tar.gz and ZIP-deflate
• zlib (deflate64) - Extract ZIP-deflate64
• liblzma - Extract tar.xz and ZIP-xz
• zstd - Extract tar.zst and ZIP-zstd
• mimalloc - mimalloc is a compact general purpose allocator with excellent performance

Baulk Icons made by Smashicons from www.flaticon.com