deb-get

deb-get is a tool that provides apt-get functionality for 3rd party repos and direct-download .deb files.
Critical to use a GitHub Personal Access Token to avoid rate limiting issues

It's honestly awesome, and I wish I'd known about it earlier; super easy to use, great for installing tools like Zoom or Obsidian or Resilio Sync. It just requires a little setup to work perfectly.

Commands

Generally, commands follow apt-get

deb-get list
1. Show all available apps for installation through deb-get
2. Use --installed to show only installed apps, and --not-installed to show all apps not installed.
deb-get search <app>
1. Find an app with the string in part of the name
  1. e.g., deb-get search pass returns 1password, enpass, and keepassxc

Setup

Install

Follow the GitHub instructions to download and install deb-get.

GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT)

Create a GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT).
1. Click on your Profile Icon (top right)>Settings>Developer Settings (bottom left)>Personal access tokens (left)>Fine-grained tokens>Generate new token
2. Configure the PAT
  1. Name
  2. Expiration (up to 1-year out)
  3. When selecting repository access, just set it to "Public Repositories (read-only)".
  4. Generate token
Insert it into your current working session
1. Open your terminal and run export DEBGET_TOKEN=github_pat_whatever-your-token-is
2. Update deb-get sudo deb-get update
Add it to your .profile or .zshrc config file (depending on if you use ZSH as your shell)
1. The following commands will append the token to the config file; be sure you know which one you're using.
2. Be careful that you don't share your .profile or .zshrc file with anyone or on GitHub!
3. echo "export DEBGET_TOKEN=github_pat_whatever-your-token-is" >> ~/.profile
4. echo "export DEBGET_TOKEN=github_pat_whatever-your-token-is" >> ~/.zshrc
  1. If you use Oh My ZSH, run omz reload to re-run the config and load the token

Verify your token is working

First, verify the token is set correctly:

echo $DEBGET_TOKEN
If you see your token, then the variable is set; if you don't, check your prior commands or run the export DEBGET... command manually to add it to the environment

Second, test that it's functional:

Per the answer to this closed issue, you can run the following command to verify it's working:

# Query GitHub to check validity of GitHub PAT token.
curl \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${DEBGET_TOKEN}" \
  https://api.github.com/rate_limit

If you get back a bunch of JSON objects, you're golden!
The objects are formatted like this:

...
  "rate": {
    "limit": 5000,
    "used": 0,
    "remaining": 5000,
    "reset": 1726008283
  }
...

If the token is misconfigured, you'll see this:

{
  "message": "Bad credentials",
  "documentation_url": "https://docs.github.com/rest",
  "status": "401"
}

Update and use deb-get

Before you can use deb-get to install anything, you need to update its list of repos. As mentioned before, this is basically the same as with apt-get; just run deb-get update, and it will pull a list of all available repos to install from.

To begin installing applications, I recommend running deb-get list and scrolling through to check for any apps you may have already installed manually, with Flatpak, or Snap, and deciding if you want to remove and reinstall them with deb-get.

For example, I installed GitHub Desktop before getting deb-get, and I started getting warnings about the repo (shiftkey) I chose; not sure why, but it was preventing me from running updates, I had to remove it.

NOTE: I typically use Nala instead of apt-get, which has a few neat features, but I'm showing apt here for universality.

sudo apt remove github-desktop
sudo deb-get update
sudo deb-get install github-desktop

I then went and remove the problematic repo from /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ and everything was golden!

Metadata

Sources

GitHub - wimpysworld/deb-get: apt-get for .debs published via GitHub or direct download 📦