Apk: how to determine which packages were "user-installed"?

davygravy · January 30, 2026, 3:24am

Using apk, how does one determine which packages were "user-installed"?

With ipkg it seems there was a way to determine the install date/time, so one could determine which packages were installed after the firmware flashing process.

Is there a script lying around that I missed perhaps? From what I can see, there isn’t an easy way to quickly parse this out within the confines of the installation itself, instead of comparing the list at https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/ to what is currently installed.

I do see that /etc/apk/world contains all installed packages, but no details there.

DBAA · January 30, 2026, 3:49am

Could compare to /rom/etc/apk/world which has the original package list. This doesn’t list what was upgraded however.

grep -Fxv -f /rom/etc/apk/world /etc/apk/world

Or to list removed packages reverse the arguments:

grep -Fxv -f /etc/apk/world /rom/etc/apk/world

davygravy · January 30, 2026, 3:56am

Thanks @DBAA, that is the idea that I was looking for. Your command listed above seems to show what was uninstalled, which is also important. For newly installed packages, just needed to change the order of the operands ( grep -Fxv -f orig.list new.list ):

root@Host:/usr# grep -Fxv -f /rom/etc/apk/world /etc/apk/world
arp-scan
arp-scan-database
fping
luci-app-advanced-reboot
luci-app-usteer
nano
snmp-utils-nossl
umdns
usteer
wpad-openssl
zram-swap

DBAA · January 30, 2026, 4:03am

I only did a quick test and since it output a package I posted it. Of course it was listing a package I had removed. Opps.

DBAA · January 30, 2026, 4:37am

Looking around a bit more and there is also /lib/apk/db/installed which has more information on each installed package including version. Comparing with the /rom version a list of updates could be produced in addition to adds and deletes.

efahl · January 30, 2026, 4:55pm

The apk query applet might be useful here, as it can output its results in json which can make the parsing bit a lot easier.

apk --installed query --format json --fields name,version,depends '*dnsmasq*'

And if you want to parse through world and installed db to do various analyses, you could grab this and hack it up. (It's intended to clean out any non-top-level packages in world, hence the name.)

github.com/efahl/tools

src/world-cleaner.uc

main

#!/usr/bin/ucode -S
// Copyright (c) 2025 Eric Fahlgren <eric.fahlgren@gmail.com>
// SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-only
// vim: set noexpandtab softtabstop=8 shiftwidth=8 syntax=javascript:
//------------------------------------------------------------------------------
//
// An apk utility to scan the installed packages and create a new world
// file containing only two things:
//
//   1) The top-level packages, upon which no other packages depend;
//   2) Pinned packages, i.e., those that are specified in the world
//      with a version constraint.
//
// If the output contains more entries than the current world file, you can
// copy the output there safely.  A typical command sequence to update your
// world might look like this, using vimdiff to cherry pick changes:
//
//   $ world-cleaner.uc > new_world
//   $ vimdiff new_world /etc/apk/world
//

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davygravy · January 30, 2026, 9:54pm

@efahl & @DBAA , merci beaucoup, so much stuff to think about…