Overview

Alpa is basically a software repository which stores RPM packages in GitHub repository. You can make as many RPMs for different operating systems or targets as they are supported by Copr (to know for what targets are supported by Copr, see Copr targets). To create an RPM package, you only need to create a spec file, correctly specify the upstream source in it from which the source will be downloaded and specify some metadata like your GitHub username in case somebody want to contact you.

What is Alpa’s use-case

The main advantage of Alpa is that you can pack a lot of RPM packages that you don’t develop directly and put them into one big repository and maintain them from one place. So if you decide to set up a repository for a bunch of e.g. bioinformatics or astronomy programs with a couple of maintainers on your team, but you don’t want to maintain each package separately in a separate repository, Alpa is the right tool for you since it allows you to manage everything from one place.

Components

Alpa consists of several independent components, which together behave as a whole providing the functionality of a software repository.

CLI

A key component (besides the correct configuration of the repository itself) is the Alpa CLI, which helps maintainers to communicate correctly with the repository. This command line interface allows package maintainers to manage a package, make modifications to it, and then push those modifications to the repository. For more, see CLI setup

Actions

You can also extend the basic functionality of the repository with two tools that are designed as GitHub Actions for easy deployment to the repository. These are for deleting packages and adding new packages privately without commit permissions to the repository. The second functionality is the automatic detection of a new version of an upstream program and its subsequent automatic update.

To know more about deleting/adding packages, see Manage package requests for Alpa repository
To know more about automatic updates, see Automatically update packages

Copr targets

Copr supports many targets for which you can create RPM packages. To see all possible targets, please install copr-cli and then run this command:

$ copr list-chroots
amazonlinux-2023-aarch64
amazonlinux-2023-x86_64
centos-stream+epel-next-8-aarch64
centos-stream+epel-next-8-ppc64le
centos-stream+epel-next-8-x86_64
centos-stream+epel-next-9-aarch64
...