Listing Installed Packages in Alpine Linux

One of the first challenges when learning a new Linux distribution is figuring out what software is actually installed on the system. This document explains how to determine which packages are installed on an Alpine Linux system.

Alpine Packages

To list every native Alpine package that you have installed, run:

apk info

To check to see if a specific package is installed, pipe the output of the above command to the grep command, and use grep to look for the package. For example, to see if the “linux-lts” package is installed, you would run:

apk info | grep linux-lts

If a package matching the specified name is installed, then it will be displayed as the output of the grep command. If no matching package is installed, then no output is displayed.

Be careful to check that the displayed output exactly matches the package name you’re seeking. For example, if you run:

apk info | grep linux

then all packages that have “linux” in their names will be displayed. You will need to look at the output to determine if the specific package you need is installed.

Flatpak Packages

If you’re using Flatpak, you can list the installed packages by running:

flatpak list

Note that this list can be a bit long with even just a few Flatpaks installed, since there normally are platform and other runtime packages installed as dependencies.