stew

Note

stew is a single-maintainer project; its last release was 0.6.0 (April 2025) and issues have since accumulated, though it is not archived.

ID

stew

Home page

https://github.com/marwanhawari/stew

Version requirement

>= 0.3

Platforms

🐧 Linux · 🍎 macOS · 🪟 Windows

Operations

installed · install · upgrade · upgrade_all · remove

purl types

pkg:stew

CLI name

stew

Issues and PRs

📦 manager: stew

Source

meta_package_manager/managers/stew.toml

Stew installs pre-compiled binaries from GitHub Releases.

Parsing notes:

  • stew search launches an interactive terminal UI and cannot be used programmatically, so no search operation is declared.

  • Stew identifies packages by binary name for upgrade and uninstall, but uses the owner/repo format for install.

  • stew list --tags mixes two line shapes: GitHub-sourced packages (“binary:owner/repo@tag”, whose tag is the version, cosmetic “v” prefix stripped) and URL-sourced packages (“binary:url”, carrying no version). The installed regex alternation covers both, keeping the version group out of the URL branch so those packages are yielded version-less.

What mpm adds to stew

mpm reaches across every manager at once, not stew alone: mpm installed and mpm outdated cover stew alongside every other manager you run in one table, mpm upgrade --all updates them together, and mpm sbom exports the whole machine as one bill of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 stew commands, in mpm

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

To…

With stew

With mpm

List what’s installed

stew list --tags

mpm --stew installed

Install a package

stew install <package_id>

mpm install pkg:stew/<package_id>

Upgrade one package

stew upgrade <package_id>

mpm --stew upgrade <package_id>

Upgrade everything

stew upgrade --all

mpm --stew upgrade --all

Remove a package

stew uninstall <package_id>

mpm remove pkg:stew/<package_id>

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

installed

✓

outdated

orphans

search

install

✓

upgrade

✓

upgrade_all

✓

remove

✓

sync

cleanup

doctor

Selecting and configuring stew

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

[mpm]
stew = false

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

[mpm.managers.stew]
timeout = 900

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

Recipes

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

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

  • Export a compliance SBOM: mpm --stew 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.

None of its operations needs root.

See privilege escalation for the full policy.

Cooldown

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

Status: ❌ None

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: GitHub release assets

  • Retraction: None: withdrawing a build is the upstream author deleting their own release or tag. Nothing sits between them and the user

  • Publish date: ✅ server-set published_at on each release (REST API)

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:

$ stew --version
stew version v0.6.0

and extracted with:

r"stew version v(?P<version>\S+)"

Reference traces

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

$ stew list --tags
gh:cli/cli@v2.4.0
fzf:junegunn/fzf@0.29.0
hyperfine:https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine/releases/download/v1.12.0/hyperfine-v1.12.0-x86_64-apple-darwin.tar.gz
rg:BurntSushi/ripgrep@13.0.0

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 --stew installed --output json, or csv, toml, yaml), each package carrying a purl and a version comparable across managers.

Changelog

  • 7.3.0 (2026-07-17)

    • Convert from a Python class to a bundled configuration definition, its two installed-listing regexes merged into one alternation, with no functional change.

  • 6.3.0 (2026-04-09)

    • Add Stew package manager for installing pre-compiled binaries from GitHub Releases. Closes #1680.