Copyright © 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 Dimitri Fontaine.

     DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, December 2004

     Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar sam@hocevar.net

     Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long as the name is changed.

     DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

     0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.

El-Get User Manual
******************

El-Get is an Emacs Extension manager that allows you to install, update and remove external Emacs Lisp extensions. More importantly, El-Get will care about initializing installed extensions for you at Emacs Startup.

Introduction
************

El-Get allows you to install and manage Emacs Lisp code for Emacs. It supports lots of differents types of sources and is able to install them, update them and remove them, and more importantly it will init them for you.

That means it will require the features you need, load the necessary files, set the Info paths so that C-h i shows the new documentation you now depend on, and finally call your own post-init function for you to setup the extension. Or call it a package.

El-Get Version String (M-x el-get-version) are now inspired by how Emacs itself numbers its versions.  First is the major version number, then a dot, then the minor version number.  The minor version number is 0 when still developing the next major version.  So 3.0 is a developer release while 3.1 is a stable release.

Please note that this versioning policy has been picked while backing 1.2~dev, so 1.0 was a "stable" release in fact.  Ah, history.

El-Get is considered to now have reached a very stable state where it only receives bug fixes, code refactoring, and new recipes. The current version is now 5.1, which is stable, and maintained in the ``master'' git branch.

Acknowledgments
***************

Dimitri Fontaine started the whole project and still manages the releases, and sometimes even contribute code and documentation.

Julien Danjou has been a contributor since very early days, about the first beta tester of the idea, before we really knew how much to achieve.

Ryan C. Thompson joined and commented some issues, began contributing and quickly became top-level and most active contributor to the project, getting a commit bit and some management duties. He manages tests and issues on github as much as he can spares time to El-Get.

Dave Abrahams contributed lots of code and efforts to make things right™. He's still using El-Get, but decided to retire from the project.

Lots of people (more than we can list here) did contribute to El-Get either recipes, bug fixes or ideas to implement, often with code. That builds up an awesome community, thanks guys!

     ~/dev/emacs/el-get git --no-pager shortlog -n -s | wc -l
          258
     ~/dev/emacs/el-get git --no-pager shortlog -n -s | head -15
       1058	Dimitri Fontaine
        359	Ryan C. Thompson
        159	Julien Danjou
        110	Dave Abrahams
         97	Sébastien Gross
         94	Takafumi Arakaki
         92	yagnesh రాఘవ
         86	Ryan Thompson
         73	Rüdiger Sonderfeld
         62	David Holm
         56	Yakkala Yagnesh Raghava
         48	Alex Ott
         40	Shigenobu Nishikawa
         35	Damien Cassou
         23	Reuben Thomas

Glossary
********

Autoload
     Delay loading a package definition until its first use.

Build
     Action that happens at see Glossary - Install, and see Glossary - Update. Packages might skip any build step entirely. When given, the build step allows to run system level tools (think make), often to produce to derivative files.

Byte-Compile
     Action to compile Emacs Lisp files so that loading them is faster. El-Get is able to automatically manage that step at install and update time so that init time is faster, see Glossary - Init.

Dependency
     Any El-Get package can depend on some others. At install time, El-Get will make sure all dependant packages are installed first. At init time, same thing will happen. Dependency management is solved with a topological sort so that if you install a package a that depends on a package b that depends on a package c, El-Get will install c then b then a.

Init
     When you start Emacs you want your packages to get setup and ready to serve whatever usage you have of this advanced Operating System. El-Get calls this setup step the init and will care about initializing your packages automatically given a see Glossary - Recipe.

Install
     El-Get install a package by fetching its sources as described in the package recipe, then running the build steps if the recipe contains such.

Method
     An El-Get method is a backend code providing facilities to fetch, install, update and remove external code. El-Get currently implements methods that targets apt-get, brew, builtin, bzr, cvs, darcs, elpa, emacsmirror, emacswiki, fink, fossil, git and git-svn, github github-tar and github-zip, go, hg, http http-tar and http-zip, pacman and svn.

Notification
     El-Get notifies its user when a package is done installing, updating or removing. It knows how to use several system level notification facilities, such as DBUS or growl.

Package
     A package is what El-Get manages for you. It's a set of Emacs Lisp files (possible a set of a single file, possibly with some Info documentation and build scripts, etc) that El-Get knows how to fetch and install, update and remove, and init at Emacs Startup.

Recipe
     An El-Get recipe describes a package in terms that allow El-Get to provide its features against that package. It's easy enough to write recipes, and fun to share them!

Remove
     El-Get removes a package by simple removing the directory where the package is installed. If you want the features of the package to get unloaded, most often the easier way to do that is to restart Emacs.

Status
     One of available, installed, required or removed. When El-Get is asked to install a package, the status is set to required before to fetch and build it, so that in case of error the system knows to try installing again.

Update
     El-Get updates a package in different ways, depending on the package type and the associated method. In some cases it's not possible to update a package, like when it switched from svn to git for example.

Installing
**********

El-Get comes with a *scratch*-installer. Ideally you would install El-Get with El-Get itself, but I couldn't figure out how to do that, so instead you have to copy and paste the following code into your *scratch* buffer and evaluate it:

     ;; So the idea is that you copy/paste this code into your *scratch* buffer,
     ;; hit C-j, and you have a working el-get.
     (url-retrieve
      "https://raw.github.com/dimitri/el-get/master/el-get-install.el"
      (lambda (s)
        (goto-char (point-max))
        (eval-print-last-sexp)))

To evaluate that code, you place the point at the end of the text block (just after the last closing paren) and you type C-j.

Developper version
==================

The lazy installer uses the default el-get-install.el file which targets the stable branch.  To install El-Get directly on the master branch, summon the el-get-master-branch variable into existence:

     ;; So the idea is that you copy/paste this code into your *scratch* buffer,
     ;; hit C-j, and you have a working developper edition of el-get.
     (url-retrieve
      "https://raw.github.com/dimitri/el-get/master/el-get-install.el"
      (lambda (s)
        (let (el-get-master-branch)
          (goto-char (point-max))
          (eval-print-last-sexp))))

Skip Emacswiki recipes when installing
======================================

The installer will fetch from emacswiki all the recipe available there and install a local copy of those in your system automatically. Should you want to disable that feature, the following snippet is showing how to:

     ;; So the idea is that you copy/paste this code into your *scratch* buffer,
     ;; hit C-j, and you have a working el-get (without emacswiki automatic
     ;; recipes).
     (url-retrieve
      "https://raw.github.com/dimitri/el-get/master/el-get-install.el"
      (lambda (s)
        (let (el-get-install-skip-emacswiki-recipes)
          (goto-char (point-max))
          (eval-print-last-sexp))))

Usage
*****

Now that El-Get is installed, simply use M-x el-get-install and pick whatever package you need.

Here's a list of commands provided by El-Get:

el-get-list-packages
     List all available packages with their names, see Glossary - Status, and description. Name and description are taken from the recipe file of the package.

     You can find which recipe file is used for a given package using el-get-find-recipe-file or el-get-describe.

el-get-describe
     Offers a full text description of a package with buttons to install, remove and update, and with the recipe content.

el-get-find-recipe-file
     Find the recipe file for given recipe, prompted.

el-get-install
     Install given package, as prompted.

el-get-init
     Initialize given package, as prompted. If some user code is setup to be run at initialisation, it will get run by this command. See User Init.

el-get-update
     Update a given package, as prompted. In some cases a straight update is not possible (recipe switched from CVS to git is a common reason). El-Get will try and detect such cases and do el-get-remove then el-get-install if necessary.

     Please realise that updating packages might break your current package setup and that you will have to revisit your setup accordingly.

el-get-remove
     Remove given package, as prompted.

el-get-self-update
     Update El-Get itself, and force that update to be synchronous. That allows to make sure you're not updating El-Get code while trying to update or install some other package at the same time.

el-get-update-all
     Will update all packages that have the installed status in your status file.  Before the update you will be prompted for confirmation that you wish to proceed.

     Beware that using this function can lead to hours of settings review: more often than not updating a package requires some adjustments to your setup.  Updating all of them at once will require reviewing almost all your setup.

el-get-reload

     Reload the given package files.  Happens automatically at update time too.

Setup
*****

El-Get setup can be very simple or arbitrarily complex. This chapter explains how to do the very basic setup, which allow for using M-x el-get-install and friends, then how to get a more involved setup.

Basic Setup
===========

You can then arrange to have El-Get part of your setup, so that at next emacs startup the installed packages are initialized.

     (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/el-get/el-get")

     (unless (require 'el-get nil t)
       (with-current-buffer
           (url-retrieve-synchronously
            "https://raw.github.com/dimitri/el-get/master/el-get-install.el")
         (goto-char (point-max))
         (eval-print-last-sexp)))

     (add-to-list 'el-get-recipe-path "~/.emacs.d/el-get-user/recipes")
     (el-get 'sync)

The el-get command will check that each and every package is installed on your system (in el-get-dir and if that's not the case, it will actually install it. Then, it will init the packages: that means caring about the load-path, the Info-directory-list (and dir texinfo menu building) the loading of the emacs-lisp files, and finally it will require the features or eval the package autoloads.

This usage is pretty simple to setup and use, but fails to cater with more complex setups involving multiple deployments (home and work laptop would be a classic example). El-Get fully supports that distributed setup, though, and this chapter explain how.

The el-get function
===================

Ensure that packages have been downloaded once and init them as needed.

This will not update the sources by using apt-get install or git pull, but it will ensure that:

  * the packages have been installed

  * load-path is set so their elisp files can be found

  * Info-directory-list is set so their info files can be found

  * Autoloads have been prepared and evaluated for each package

  * Any post-installation setup (e.g. `(require 'feature)') happens

When SYNC is nil (the default), all installations run concurrently, in the background.

When SYNC is sync, each package will be installed synchronously, and any error will stop it all.

Please note that the el-get-init part of el-get is always done synchronously. There's byte-compile support though, and the packages you use are welcome to use autoload too. You can also force your setup to be loaded lazily with the el-get-is-lazy variable.

PACKAGES is expected to be a list of packages you want to install or init.  When PACKAGES is omited (the default), the list of already installed packages is considered.

Distributed Setup
=================

When you are sharing your emacs setup between several machines (work and home destops, laptop, etc); it's usual to manage your .emacs.d setup in a distributed repository (such as git). El-Get then provides an easy canonical list of packages you depend on to run emacs, and this documentation is usable as-is. It is recommended that you not store the El-Get tree in git, however; to prevent this, so you can add a pattern /el-get to .emacs.d/.gitignore.

     (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/el-get/el-get")
     (require 'el-get)

     ;; local sources
     (setq el-get-sources
      '((:name magit
         :after (global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-z") 'magit-status))

       (:name asciidoc
        :type elpa
        :after (progn
           (autoload 'doc-mode "doc-mode" nil t)
           (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.adoc$" . doc-mode))
           (add-hook 'doc-mode-hook
              '(lambda ()
               (turn-on-auto-fill)
                (require 'asciidoc)))))

       (:name lisppaste :type elpa)

       (:name emacs-goodies-el :type apt-get)))

     (setq my-packages
           (append
            '(cssh el-get switch-window vkill google-maps nxhtml xcscope yasnippet)
            (mapcar 'el-get-source-name el-get-sources)))

     (el-get 'sync my-packages)

Please note that when you unreference a package from my-packages, it remains locally installed.

Going one step further with the idea of a canonical list, el-get provides the command el-get-cleanup, which will remove all packages absent from my-packages. This allows, in effect, to put under version control only the user init file, instead of the whole .emacs.d directory, and still enjoy a truly portable emacs configuration.

In the code example above, replace the last line with the following:

     (el-get-cleanup my-packages)
     (el-get 'sync my-packages)

Setup Customization
===================

Even though the defaults that are provided by El-Get provide all that you need to get it working, there may be a reason to manually define certain settings, particularly for portability.

el-get-dir
     Path where packages are installed. Defaults to ~/.emacs.d/el-get/.

el-get-install-dir
     Path for the el-get package. Defaults to ~/.emacs.d/el-get/el-get.

el-get-install-branch
     If this is set, El-Get will be installed using the target branch.  This takes precedence over setting el-get-master-branch in the installation settings, see Installing.

el-get-git-install-url
     Use this to specify your own fork of El-Get for installation.

el-get-recipe-path-elpa
     This directory stores a local list of ELPA recipes. ~/.emacs.d/el-get/el-get/recipes/elpa

el-get-recipe-path-emacswiki

     As above for ELPA, this directory stores a local list of emacswiki recipes. Defaults to ~/.emacs.d/el-get/el-get/recipes/emacswiki/.

el-get-allow-insecure

     This determines whether or not El-Get will attempt to install packages over insecure connections; setting it to nil (recommended) will cause it to abort upon any install or update operation which uses an unencrypted URL.

User Init
*********

The main task performed by El-Get is package initialization at Emacs startup. It will care about all of them, their dependencies, and call code provided by the recipe author. You can add your own setup code and register it in a way that El-Get will evaluate it at the right time.

The package setup can either go into the :after property, or in a file named init-package.el in el-get-user-package-directory.  Any such named file will get automatically loaded by El-Get at package init time, if it exists.

Before and After properties
===========================

The :before and :after properties are evaluated by El-Get in the package initialization sequence.

:before
     This should be a lisp form to evaluate after both the Info-directory-list and the load-path variables have been taken care of, but before loading the package or any further action from el-get-init.  It will be run with the variable default-directory set to the package directory.

:after
     This should be a lisp form to evaluate after loading the package. This function is registered for eval-after-load against the recipe library by el-get-init once the :load and :features have been setup. It will be run with the variable default-directory set to the package directory.

Here's a couple of examples of package recipes that are using :before and :after properties:

       (:name asciidoc
        :type elpa
        :after (lambda ()
           (autoload 'doc-mode "doc-mode" nil t)
           (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.adoc$" . doc-mode))
           (add-hook 'doc-mode-hook '(lambda ()
                     (turn-on-auto-fill)
                     (require 'asciidoc)))))

       (:name anything
        :features anything-config
        :before (global-set-key (kbd "M-s a") 'dim:anything-occur)
        :after  (setq w3m-command nil))

Initialization files
====================

El-Get will see if a file named init-package.el exists in the directory pointed at by the el-get-user-package-directory variable. When this variable is not nil and if such a file does exist in the directory, then El-Get will load the user init file for PACKAGE.

The initialization file is loaded at the same time as the :after property would have be run, and just before it if you provide both.

El-Get automatically byte compiles the init file as needed and load the compiled version.

Recipes
*******

All of El-Get behavior is controled with recipes that you can share, download, update and author. This chapter explain how to manage your recipes and how to author them and ship them.

Recipes are a list of properties, which are documented in the variable EL-GET-SOURCES.

Organizing recipes
==================

El-Get needs to find a package recipe to be able to install or update it. After that the recipe content is saved in the status file and cached, so that you can still start Emacs even if you remove the recipe file.

The variable el-get-recipe-path is a list of directory paths to search for recipe files, in order. The recipe for a package example must be named example.rcp. The first file named that way in the el-get-recipe-path variable is used as the recipe. If you need to change it, you should do so immediately before running el-get; see the example in see Basic Setup.

To check which recipe is used for a given package, use either the M-x el-get-describe or M-x el-get-find-recipe-file command.

This organisation with several path allow you to setup El-Get to use its own recipes, recipes automatically created from online resources (such as Emacswiki), and your own local recipes.

As it's easy for El-Get to use your own recipes in the exact same way than it uses its own recipes, it allows you to share them very easily. Send the file to a friend and have it store it at the right place.

It's also possible to setup el-get-sources with recipe information. As long as the type property is not filled in el-get-sources, El-Get will first find the recipe as usual and then merge the recipe content with the recipe skeleton provided by the matching el-get-sources stanza.

El-Get also supports full User Init files, see User Init.

Getting more recipes
====================

The command M-x el-get-emacswiki-refresh downloads the list of Emacs Lisp files available at EmacsWiki. El-Get is able to automatically install any such file at the right place in el-get-dir. The integration of an automatically generated recipe is often not enough, you often have to add some initialisation code. See User Init.

The command el-get-elpa-build-local-recipes downloads the list of Emacs Lisp Packages from the ELPA archives you have setup, and make them automatically available for El-Get.

Overriding package files
========================

El-Get manages the files associated with a package. You can browse those files using the el-get-cd function. It's possible to hack on those files, be aware that doing so might break your setup capability to handle upgrades.

Authoring Recipes
*****************

Authoring recipes is often very easy. El-Get goal is to adapt to any Emacs Lisp code and distribution you can find out there in the wild, so the list of features supported is quite large. Simple cases are very simple, though.

If you want to submit recipes as pull request, please make sure to run recipe checker (see Recipe checker) and paste the result in the pull request comment.

Recipe format
=============

The recipe for the hypothetical package named el-get-example must be provided in a file named el-get-example.rcp. This file will be searched for as described in see Organizing recipes. The variable el-get-sources is also considered as a recipe source, as detailed in see Organizing recipes.

A recipe file contains a lisp property list. Accepted properties are described in the documentation for the variable el-get-sources, and their possible values are described at the same place.

If your property list is missing the :type property, then it's merged with the recipe one, so that you can override any definition provided by el-get recipes locally.

:name
     The name of the package. It can be different from the name of the directory where the package is stored (after a git clone for example), in which case a symlink will be created.

:depends
     A single package name, or a list of package names, on which the package depends.  All of a packages dependencies will be installed before the package is installed.

:builtin
     A string containing the Emacs version (see EMACS-MAJOR-VERSION variable) from which Emacs includes the recipe as a builtin.  For example, package.el (the implementation of ELPA) is part of Emacs 24 but needs an external recipe for previous major versions.

     Unlike the builtin :type no :build or :info properties are executed if this matches.

:pkgname
     The name of the package for the underlying package management system (apt-get, fink or pacman, also supported by github and emacsmirror), which can be different from the Emacs package name.

:type
     The type of the package, currently el-get offers support for apt-get, elpa, git, github, emacsmirror, git-svn, bzr svn, cvs, darcs, fink, ftp, emacswiki, http-tar, pacman, hg and http. You can easily support your own types here, see EL-GET-METHODS.

:branch
     Which branch to fetch when using git (and by extension, github and emacsmirror, which are derived from git).  Also supported in the installer in el-get-install.

:url
     Where to fetch the package, only meaningful for git and http types.

:username, :pkgname
     For the github type, these specify the user name and repo name to clone from Github. For example, for el-get, the user name would be "dimitri" , and the repo name would be "el-get" . As described above, the :pkgname property is only required if the repo name on Github differs from the Emacs package name. Note that the emacsmirror type is just like the github type with :username set to "emacsmirror" .

:build

     Your build recipe, a list.  A build command C whose `car' is a symbol (see `symbolp') will be replaced by (eval C).

     Then, each element of the recipe will be interpreted as a command:

     If the element is a list of string, the first element of the list must be the program to call, and each following element a different argument to the call.  No whitespace parsing is done.

     Otherwise, if it is a list, any list sub-elements will be recursively "flattened" (see el-get-flatten).  The resulting strings will be interpreted as individual shell arguments, appropriately quoted.

:build/system-type
     Your specific build recipe for a given SYSTEM-TYPE gets there and looks like :build.

:load-path
     A directory or a list of directories you want El-Get to add to your LOAD-PATH. Those directories are relative to where the package gets installed.

:compile
     Allow to restrict what to byte-compile: by default, El-Get will compile all elisp files in the :load-path directories, unless a :build command exists for the package source. Given a :compile property, El-Get will only byte-compile those given files, directories or filename-regexpes in the property value. This property can be a listp or a stringp if you want to compile only one of those.

:info
     This string allows you to setup a directory where to find a package.info file, or a path/to/whatever.info file. It will even run ginstall-info for you to create the dir entry so that C-h i will be able to list the newly installed documentation. Note that you might need to kill (C-x k ) your info buffer then C-h i again to be able to see the new menu entry.

:load
     List of files to load, or a single file to load after having installed the source but before `require'ing its features.

:features
     List of features el-get will require for you.

:autoloads
     Control whether El-Get should generate autoloads for this package. Setting this to nil prevents El-Get from generating autoloads for the package. Default is t. Setting this to a string or a list of string will load the named autoload files.

:library
     When using :after but not using :features , :library allows to set the library against which to register the :after function against eval-after-load.  It defaults to either :pkgname or :package , in this order. See also el-get-eval-after-load .

:options
     Currently used by http-tar and cvs support.  When using http-tar, it allows you to give the tar options you want to use. Typically would be "xzf" , but you might want to choose "xjf" for handling .tar.bz files e.g.

     When using CVS, when it's set to "login", El-Get will first issue a cvs login against the server, asking you interactively (in the minibuffer) any password you might to enter, and only then it will run the cvs checkout command.

:module
     Currently only used by the cvs support, allow you to configure the module you want to checkout in the given URL.

:repo
     Only used by the elpa support, a cons cell with the form (NAME . URL) , as in PACKAGE-ARCHIVES .  If the package source only specifies a URL, the URL will be used for NAME as well.

:prepare
     This should be a lisp form to evaluate after both the INFO-DIRECTORY-LIST and the LOAD-PATH variables have been taken care of, but before loading the package or any further action from el-get-init .  It will be run with DEFAULT-DIRECTORY set to the package directory.

:before
     This exactly like :prepare property, but is reserved for user customizations in EL-GET-SOURCES .  Recipe files should not use this property.  It will be run just after :prepare.

:post-init
     This should be a lisp form to evaluate after loading the package. Intended for use from recipes.  This function is registered for eval-after-load against the recipe library by el-get-init once the :load and :features have been setup.  Like :prepare , it will be run with DEFAULT-DIRECTORY set to the package directory.

:after
     This exactly like the :post-init property, but is reserved for user customizations in EL-GET-SOURCES.  Recipe files should not use this property.  It will be run just after :post-init and after any per-package user-init-file (see EL-GET-USER-PACKAGE-DIRECTORY).

:lazy
     Default to nil .  Allows to override EL-GET-IS-LAZY per package.

:localname
     Currently only used by both `http' and `ftp' supports, allows to specify the target name of the downloaded file.

     This option is useful if the package should be retrieved using a presentation interface (such as as web SCM tool).

     For example, destination should be set to package.el if the package url has the following scheme:

     "http://www.example.com/show-as-text?file=path/package.el"

:website
     The website of the project.

:description
     A short description of the project.

:checksum
     Some methods in El-Get download files that are not so trusted (e.g. anyone is allowed to modify emacswiki anytime).  For these cases you can set up a checksum value for a package, so you will notice if El-Get tries to install a version that you haven't seen before.  The installation will simply fail and you will see the good and bad checksum values in *Messages*.  To get the checksum value for a package initially, install the package while EL-GET-VERBOSE is on.

     Checksum calculation is currently supported by these methods with the following meaning:

     http, ftp and emacswiki with the SHA1 of the downloaded file

     git in which it is an alias for :checkout (see below)

:checkout
     A git refspec (branch, tag, commit hash) that should be checked out after cloning the git repository. If provided, this overrides any value for the :branch property. Unlike the :branch property, this can be any valid argument to git checkout, including a tag name or a commit hash. The intended use of this property is to "lock" a repository at a particular revision, regardless of what happens to the repo upstream.

     Currently this property only has meaning for git type recipes. Other VCS-based methods may implement support in the future.

:shallow
     If set to t in a git recipe, git-clone will be run with --depth 1 , which will create a so-called shallow clone by not downloading all the history of the repository. The default is controlled by the variable EL-GET-GIT-SHALLOW-CLONE, which is nil by default.

:submodule
     If set to nil in a git recipe, submodules will not be updated.

Dependencies
============

When a recipe provides a :depends property, El-Get makes sure that the given list of packages is installed and initialized before the package for the current recipe is installed and initialized.

Byte Compilation
================

By default, El-Get will recursively byte-compile the directory where the package is installed, that is each and any file called something.el. Some packages include non Emacs Lisp directories, and sometime test files that are not meant to pass byte compilation without errors or warnings. It is possible to setup your recipe to either only target some files of the package, or to bypass byte compiling entirely.

Autoloads
=========

Think about providing autoloads for your recipe if some are available. You can provide them yourself too, for packages that should have support for autoloads but ship without them.

The :prepare property of a recipe is the right place where to put added autoloads, as shown in this example:

     (:name undo-tree
            :description "Treat undo history as a tree"
            :type git
            :url "http://www.dr-qubit.org/git/undo-tree.git"
            :prepare (progn
                       (autoload 'undo-tree-mode "undo-tree.el"
                         "Undo tree mode; see undo-tree.el for details" t)
                       (autoload 'global-undo-tree-mode "undo-tree.el"
                         "Global undo tree mode" t)))

The :prepare property of a recipe is considered the same as the :before one, just evaluated after it. :prepare is meant for recipe authors whereas :before is meant for user customisations. See Before and After properties.

Build
=====

The :build property of the recipe allows for OS integration at build time. Build happens after the package has been fetched, and allows to run commands such as make.

The variable el-get-emacs contains the complete path where to find the current Emacs executable you're running, as that's something build commands often need.

As shell interpolation can get hairy, El-Get offers you to setup your build commands as Emacs Lisp list. See the magit recipe for an example:

     (:name magit
            :website "https://github.com/magit/magit#readme"
            :description "It's Magit! An Emacs mode for Git."
            :type github
            :pkgname "magit/magit"
            :info "."
            :autoloads ("50magit")
            :build (("make" "all"))
            :build/darwin `(,(concat "make EMACS=" el-get-emacs " all")))

Recipe checker
==============

There are two ways to run recipe checker.  One is to run it as an Emacs command. Run el-get-check-recipe in the buffer opening the recipe to be checked.  You can also use a script to run the checker. This is convenient if you want to check multiple recipes at once.

     test/check-recipe.el PATH/TO/RECIPE.rcp ANOTHER/RECIPE.rcp ...

MS Windows user may need to call the script like this:

     emacs -batch -Q -l test/check-recipe.el  PATH/TO/RECIPE.rcp ...

You can also test the recipe with test/test-recipe.sh.  This will actually install the package in a test environment.  An interactive version test/test-recipe-interactive.sh is also available.

     test/test-recipe.sh PATH/TO/RECIPE.rcp