Getting Started on SOW

Install SOW

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

SOW ships as a single static executable. Installing it means putting one file somewhere on your PATH. There is no package to install, no service to enable, and no state directory created until you run a command that needs one.

Supported platforms

The binary is built with CGO_ENABLED=0, so it has no libc dependency and runs on any reasonably modern kernel of the matching OS and CPU family.

OS	`amd64`	`arm64`
Linux	supported	supported
macOS (Darwin)	supported	supported

Windows is not supported. SOW relies on POSIX advisory locks, hardlinks, and atomic rename, and it is only tested on local POSIX filesystems — network filesystems such as NFS do not provide the locking and durability semantics it depends on.

Quick Start

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This page takes about five minutes. You will put some packages in a directory, run one command, serve the directory over HTTP, and install from it with dnf or apt. No configuration file, no workspace, no database — plain mode writes indexes next to your packages and nothing else.

1. Collect the packages

Any directory containing .rpm or .deb files works. The files stay where they are; SOW never moves or renames them.

Your First Workspace

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This page takes about ten minutes and builds a managed repository from nothing: a workspace, one repository, an RPM distribution and a DEB distribution inside it, packages added to both, and a look at what landed on disk. Unlike plain mode, a workspace remembers what you asked for — so you add and remove packages by name instead of by shuffling files around, and SOW rebuilds only what changed.

1. Create the workspace

mkdir -p /srv/sow
cd /srv/sow
sow init .

initialized /srv/sow: config_created=true repositories_initialized=0 dists_initialized=0

init created two things: sow.yml, which is the single source of truth for what this workspace contains, and a hidden .sow/ directory holding locks, per-repository SQLite state, and the operation journal used for crash recovery. You never edit anything under .sow/ and you never serve it.

Core Concepts

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Once you have run the quick start and built a workspace, a handful of ideas explain everything else SOW does. This page covers them: the two modes and how to choose, the four layers of the managed model, and the distinction between what you asked for and what is currently published.

Two ways to build a repository

SOW has two engines that never touch each other. Plain mode does not read sow.yml, does not perform workspace discovery, and does not create a database. Managed mode never treats a plain directory as a repository. Picking one is the first decision you make.