Shelly Package Management

The Package page is Shelly’s home for ALPM (repository) packages: search your configured repositories, install what you need, and remove what you no longer want, all from one view. System-wide upgrades have their own Update page, and AUR, Flatpak, and AppImage software are managed on their own pages.

Browsing packages

The Package page lists every package available from your configured repositories, with installed packages marked. The toolbar along the top controls what you see:

Search filters the list by package name and description; Ctrl+F jumps to the search field.
The group filter (defaults to Any) narrows the list to a single package group.
Installed Only hides packages that are not installed and adds an Install Date column to the list view.
The grid/list toggle switches between card and table layouts; the table shows Name, Version, Size, and Repository.
The cart button (N Selected) lists every package you have checked. Click an entry there to uncheck it.

Selecting a package opens a detail pane beside the list with its description, version, size, dependencies, and related metadata. The pane can be hidden with Hide Detail Pane in the options (⋮) menu.

Perform Upgrade - synchronize and upgrade the whole system as part of the next install.
Show Hidden - include packages listed in IgnorePkg in pacman.conf.
Show Explicit Only / Show Dependency Only - filter by install reason: packages you chose to install versus packages pulled in as dependencies.

Installing packages

Check one or more available packages. Each checked package appears in the cart button.
Select Install Selected.
Shelly runs the transaction in a progress view and refreshes the list when it finishes.

Installing, removing, and upgrading touch the system package database, so Shelly authorizes these operations through polkit and your desktop’s usual authentication prompt appears. If polkit is not available, Shelly warns you and blocks privileged actions; see Polkit Setup.

Removing packages

Check the installed packages you want to remove - Installed Only makes them easy to find.
Select Remove Selected and confirm in the Remove Packages dialog.

By default the removal also cascates dependencies that are no longer needed and removes unused optional dependencies. Turning on Remove Cache on Uninstall in Settings additionally deletes the packages’ configuration files.

Package actions

The detail pane’s actions menu operates on the selected package:

Reinstall - reinstall the package.
Add Ignore - add it to IgnorePkg so upgrades skip it.
Add Hold - add it to HoldPkg so it is protected from removal.
Make Explicit / Mark Dependency - change its install reason.

Updating packages

Updates live on their own Update page, which checks the System (ALPM), AUR, and Flatpak sources and lists everything with a newer version.

The System, AUR, and Flatpak toggles choose which sources are included. Everything is included by default, and the summary line shows how many of the found updates are included.
Check Again re-runs the check.
Upgrade updates everything included in one transaction. System packages are always upgraded as a full-system upgrade - there are no per-package checkboxes for them, matching Arch Linux’s advice against partial upgrades. AUR and Flatpak entries have an individual update button on their row.

Local package archives

The GTK interface does not handle local package archives; use the shelly CLI for those:

# Install a local Arch package archive (or an HTTP(S) URL)
shelly install ./example-1.0-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

# List Shelly binary packages installed under /opt/shelly
shelly search --local <term>

# Remove an installed Shelly binary package
shelly remove --local <name>

Shelly binary packages are archive-based standalone applications: they unpack into /opt/shelly, their executables are symlinked into /usr/bin, and icons and desktop entries are installed system-wide. They are not tracked by ALPM.