Atom apm

Warning

apm is unmaintained. Atom was sunset on 2022-12-15; apm is archived and no community fork (such as atom-community/apm) has produced a usable drop-in.

ID

apm

Home page

https://atom.io/packages

Version requirement

>= 1

Platforms

🅱️ BSD · 🐧 Linux · 🍎 macOS · 🪟 Windows

Operations

installed · outdated · search · install · upgrade · upgrade_all · remove · cleanup

purl types

pkg:apm

CLI name

apm

Issues and PRs

📦 manager: apm

Source

meta_package_manager/managers/apm.py

Atom’s package manager, from the sunset Atom editor.

apm installed packages and themes for GitHub’s Atom editor, exposing an npm-style CLI whose queries mpm parses from --json output.

Atom was sunset on December 15, 2022, so apm is flagged unmaintained here. mpm keeps the wrapper while doing so stays cheap: the community fork atom-community/apm has been floated but never produced a usable drop-in, and per the project’s stability policy an unmaintained manager may be dropped without notice once it becomes a burden to maintain.

What mpm adds to apm

Through mpm, apm gains --exact search, to narrow results to exact names.

Bigger still, mpm reaches across every manager at once: mpm installed and mpm outdated cover apm alongside every other manager you run in one table, mpm upgrade --all updates them together, and mpm sbom exports the whole machine as one bill of materials.

Every mpm command also gains --dry-run and --plan previews, cross-scheme version comparison and purl identifiers. See manager augmentations for how each one is built.

Your apm commands, in mpm

You already know apm: each operation maps one-to-one onto mpm, in an interface shared by every manager.

To…

With apm

With mpm

List what’s installed

apm list --json

mpm --apm installed

List outdated packages

apm outdated --compatible --json

mpm --apm outdated

Search for a package

apm search --json python

mpm --apm search python

Install a package

apm install image-view

mpm install pkg:apm/image-view

Upgrade one package

apm update --no-confirm image-view

mpm --apm upgrade image-view

Upgrade everything

apm update --no-confirm

mpm --apm upgrade --all

Remove a package

apm uninstall image-view

mpm remove pkg:apm/image-view

Clear caches

apm clean

mpm --apm cleanup --cache

Prefix any command above with --dry-run to simulate the underlying manager calls without touching the system: the safe way to watch what mpm would do before trusting it.

Operations

Operation

Supported

Notes

installed

outdated

orphans

search

exact search backfilled by mpm

install

upgrade

upgrade_all

remove

sync

cleanup

doctor

Selecting and configuring apm

Deselect apm for a single run with --no-apm, or persist the choice in your configuration:

[mpm]
apm = false

Keep it enabled but tune how mpm drives it with a per-manager override:

[mpm.managers.apm]
timeout = 900

mpm config-template apm prints every overridable attribute as a ready-to-paste block.

Recipes

A few jobs you would otherwise script around apm, one mpm command each:

  • Snapshot and clone a machine: mpm --apm dump apm.toml, then mpm restore apm.toml on the next one.

  • Export a compliance SBOM: mpm --apm sbom (CycloneDX by default, --spdx for SPDX).

Privilege escalation

mpm runs this manager as the current user and never prepends sudo by default. Flip the policy for its privileged operations with --sudo or the per-manager sudo override.

See privilege escalation for the full policy.

Cooldown

State of Atom apm’s release-age gating, from the cooldown support table:

  • Status: ➖ N/A (archived June 2022)

  • Reference: atom/apm

A cooldown only pays off where a compromised release can be withdrawn while the clock runs, and can only be emulated where the registry dates its releases. From the retraction table:

  • Registry: No registry of their own

  • Retraction: ➖ Not applicable: these managers either delegate to whichever manager they front (pkcon, topgrade) or wrap a retired project or a discontinued platform

With --cooldown set, mpm skips this manager’s install and upgrade operations rather than run them unguarded (fail-closed); --allow-unsupported-managers opts back in.

Version probe

The version is probed by running:

$ apm --version
apm  2.6.2
npm  6.14.13
node 12.14.1 x64
atom 1.58.0
python 2.7.16
git 2.33.0

and extracted with:

r"apm\s+(?P<version>\S+)"

Reference traces

Raw native outputs captured in the manager source: the reference mpm’s parsers were written against. If you know Atom apm well and a transcript below looks wrong, or a newer release changed its output format, report it.

$ apm list --json
{
  "core": [
    {
      "name": "background-tips",
      "version": "0.26.1",
      "description": "Displays tips about Atom in the background."
    }
  ],
  "user": [
    {
      "name": "file-icons",
      "version": "2.0.9",
      "description": "Assign file extension icons"
    }
  ]
}
$ apm outdated --compatible --json
[
  {
    "name": "file-icons",
    "version": "2.0.9",
    "latestVersion": "2.0.10",
    "description": "Assign file extension icons"
  }
]

Feed any of these through mpm and the raw output becomes one uniform table, the same shape for every manager: filter it, project columns, or export it (mpm --apm installed --output json, or csv, toml, yaml), each package carrying a purl and a version comparable across managers.

Changelog

  • 6.4.0 (2026-04-27)

    • Add remove operation. Closes #1775.

    • Add cleanup operation.

  • 5.9.0 (2022-11-20)

    • Flag apm as deprecated.

  • 2.5.0 (2017-03-01)

    • Allow use of apm, gem and npm managers on Linux.

  • 1.2.0 (2016-07-08)

    • Add support for both pip2 and pip3, Node’s npm, Atom’s apm, Ruby’s gem.