Hi, I'm Michael, the creator of Alpakr. I read a lot of code in many different languages. Part of that is looking into what third party packages are used. This can be by reading package.json files or skimming through the text when compiling a Rust program. I wanted to make it easier to learn about packages I don't know about and skip the step of Googling and/or visiting packager sites like npmjs or crates.io. The CLI uses a backend service by making a request with the input base64 encoded and back comes a list of summaries and package links when identified. The payload is base64 encoded to ensure whitespace and other symbols are encoded. This is so that the machine learning backed function has a better chance of identifying what context the input is from. Snippet from package.json, Cargo.toml or copy paste from a rust program compiling. The machine learning aspect was important for me so that I could avoid passing arguments to the tool. It just works™️. But it was also something I wanted to add to learn more about taking a ML model to production. Once the packager is identified the packages are looked up in their respective package repositories (e.g. npm -> npmjs.com, cargo -> crates.io) and data is mapped and stored in a DB for future lookups for speed and to avoid being throttled. If you are curious about the data being sent you can enable --verbose to see what is sent and is returned. You can also use --json to get the data back as JSON instead of nicely printed in the console. The tool works best if it has at least one full line for context. Next up is a mobile app for when you read code on the go or before sleeping at night.

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Promoted

Maker

4yr ago

Fun fact: the ML model also supports gomod, maven, and others, but I had a hard time in a simple way to look up package details. If anyone is interested helping out with that I don't mind adding it to the tool.

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Alpakr CLI

Simple package lookup service for npm, crates, pip and more

Simple package lookup service for npm, crates, pip and more