package manager

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package manager is a piece of software used to install, update and remove other pieces of software, usually including handling any dependencies that need to be installed.

Package managers are more common on Unix-like operating systems, but as of 2025, most operating systems have a package manager available for developers and many programming languages have a package manager of their own.

App stores are roughly equivalent to package managers, but exclusively focused on binary packages, whereas package managers often deal with libraries and source code packages as well as binaries.

Some examples of system package managers include apt, Homebrew, dnf, winget and pacman, while gem, pip, composer and npm are package managers for Ruby, Python, PHP and NodeJS.