I use Emacs on several different computers. To keep my configuration
consistent across all of them, I do what many people do and made the
~/.emacs.d directory a
git repository. I don’t like
to keep copies of all of the Elisp extensions that I use, such as
paredit and geiser, in this repository. Instead, I prefer to use
package.el (introduced in Emacs 24) with the
MELPA repository. This saves me from having to
manually keep all of the extensions I use up-to-date, but requires
another method to keep useful packages in sync between computers.
There’s a project called Pallet that solves this problem, but it was too heavy for my liking. Instead, I wrote a short function that simply iterates over a list of required packages and installs those that are not currently installed.
;; Additional packages that I use.
(setq required-packages
'(better-defaults
elfeed
geiser
ido-ubiquitous
js2-mode
magit
paredit
rainbow-delimiters
smex))
(defun install-missing-packages ()
"Install all required packages that haven’t been installed."
(interactive)
(mapc (lambda (package)
(unless (package-installed-p package)
(package-install package)))
required-packages)
(message "Installed all missing packages!"))Now, it’s as easy as typing M-x install-missing-packages RET when
starting Emacs for the first time on a new computer to download all of
the extensions that I need. Note that before calling
install-missing-packages you must have already initialized the
package manager via the package-initialize function. This approach
does require some manual bookkeeping in order to keep the
required-packages list up-to-date with your workflow, but I haven’t
found it to be problematic.
Update: If this solution is too simplistic for you, you should check out use-package, which reddit user lunayorn pointed out to me. Thanks!
Check out the comments on reddit.