Improve your AutoPkg repo-add Commands

Over the years, I have seen a lot of instances of one of these two snippets used to configure AutoPkg to add a list of recipe repositories.

for repo in $(cat repo_list.txt); do
  autopkg repo-add $repo
done

while read -r line ; do
  autopkg repo-add $line
done < repo_list.txt

These both work, but they are inefficient. In both cases, you are looping over the list and running autopkg repo-add on each repository. The more repositories you add to your list, the slower it becomes.

I’m here to tell you that there is a better way. The repo-add verb can take a list of repositories, so you only need to call it once.

xargs autopkg repo-add < repo_list.txt

This snippet is both easier to read and more performant. In essense, it reads the contents of the file and runs a single command to add all of the repositories at once.

If you are running AutoPkg in an environment that charges by the minute, little performance boosts like this can really add up. Small change, big payoff.

Happy automating!