pkgcli As PackageKit's Modern, Nicer Command Line Interface

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 14 June 2026 at 06:09 AM EDT. 6 Comments
FREE SOFTWARE
Open-source developer Matthias Klumpp wrote a blog post today outlining his recent work developing pkgcli, a new and modern command-line interface (CLI) around the PackageKit package management abstraction layer.

After nearly two decades of dealing with PackageKit's pkcon CLI that was thrown together over the years, Klumpp developed pkgcli as part of his Sovereign Tech Agency fellowship. The pkgcli tool was designed from the ground-up to be human friendly both from the available command names to the output, a nice scripting experience via JSON lines for those passing the "--json" argument, sensible defaults, and all around a better experience for interacting with the PackageKit package management abstraction layer.

pkgcli on Ubuntu


Those wanting to learn more about the pkgcli new command line interface for PackageKit can do so via this blog post. As this has been a long time in the making, for those already on an up-to-date Linux distribution may already find pkgcli available if shipping the latest PackageKit.
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