Copr is a build-system for anyone in the Fedora community. It hosts thousands of projects for various purposes and audiences. Some of them should never be installed by anyone, some are already being transitioned to the official Fedora Linux repositories, and the rest are somewhere in between. Copr gives you the opportunity to install 3rd party software that is not available in Fedora Linux repositories, try nightly versions of your dependencies, use patched builds of your favorite tools to support some non-standard use-cases, and just experiment freely.
This article takes a closer look at interesting projects that recently landed in Copr.
If you don’t know how to enable a repository or if you are concerned about whether is it safe to use Copr, please consult the project documentation.
PyInstaller
Do you need to ship your Python script to a customer? And for a reason, you cannot use either RPM or Flatpak? Try PyInstaller! You just use the following command:
pyinstaller yourscript.py
and pyinstaller will extract your dependencies and bundle everything together. It will create a yourscript binary (ELF) and the yourscript/ directory with all these bundles. I tried it with one of my small scripts, and it created a 566 MB big directory and 20MB binary. See PyInstaller documentation for how to use it.
Installation instructions
The repo currently provides PyInstaller for EPEL 9, Fedora 38, 39, 40, and Fedora Rawhide. To install it, use these commands:
sudo dnf copr enable slaanesh/PyInstaller sudo dnf -y install python3-pyinstaller
Anime Games Launcher
Anime Games Launcher is very similar to Lutris, but focuses on Anime Games only. It is a wrapper around Wine and allows you to launch the game. E.g. you can run a very popular game GenShin. You can do the same with Lutris, but it certainly requires more effort. With Anime Games Launcher, it was literally two clicks.
Installation instructions
The repo currently provides Launcher for Fedora 39, 40, and Fedora Rawhide. To install it, use these commands:
sudo dnf copr enable retrozinndev/anime-games-launcher sudo dnf install anime-games-launcher anime-games-launcher
ec2-instance-connect
AWS EC2 Instance Connect Configuration is a set of configurations and scripts that allows you to connect to a VM instance from the AWS dashboard using EC2 Instance Connect. For the connections, SSH is used – so this is a configuration for SSH and several supporting tools. This repository is owned by Major Hayden, a Cloud SIG member. The description of this project is “initial packaging”, so we may find this package in core Fedora one day.
Installation instructions
The repo currently provides packages for RHEL 9, Fedora 39, and Fedora Rawhide. To install it, use this command:
sudo dnf copr enable mhayden/ec2-instance-connect
Gitea
I will quote Wikipedia:
“Gitea (/ɡɪˈtiː/) is a forge software package for hosting software development version control using Git as well as other collaborative features like bug tracking, code review, continuous integration, kanban boards, tickets, and wikis. It supports self-hosting but also provides a free public first-party instance…”
This Copr project includes packages that allow you to deploy the self-hosted instance.
Installation instructions
The repo currently provides packages for Fedora 38, 39, and 40. To install it, use this command:
sudo dnf copr enable felfert/gitea
See upstream installation instructions.
GroovyMan
Thank your for making gitea availble for Fedora!
So i can resign from docker (or pod)
hammerhead corvette
“Some of them should never be installed by anyone”
That is an interesting statement. . . I think it discourages the use of COPR, which is a double edge sword or sorts.
Phoenix
Sadly, this statement is true, however. I recall that back in the time where I started following Fedora Magazine articles and read them when the title sounded interesting, there was a COPR software package advertised I was interested in.
Being careful about anything unknown/new before even trying to install it, I navigated to their website for more information, just to be stopped by my browser (or one of its extensions) warning me about the site being bad for some reason I cannot recall anymore (malware? not sure). Naturally I never installed that package.
However, this one incident, particularly for it happening the first time I tried to utilize COPR, made me give COPR a wide berth ruining my experience entirely and I became extremely wary concerning anything advertised for it.
I can only hope that the “background checks” had improved, so that current advertisements done here do not end up getting users the same experience I got.
Jakub Kadlčík
Some level of caution before enabling Copr repositories is justified. The projects and their packages are maintained by the community and there is no guarantee. I’d refer to the Copr FAQ – https://docs.pagure.org/copr.copr/user_documentation.html#is-it-safe-to-use-copr
I am not sure what can be done to improve the situation, do you have any suggestions? Please feel free to file a RFE in the Copr issue tracker https://github.com/fedora-copr/copr
Jakub Kadlčík
I respectably disagree. Are there some low-quality or useless packages in Copr? Sure. But it is the same for any other community-driven software repositories like the beloved Arch Linux AUR, language-specific repositories like PyPI or NPM, container repositories like Docker Hub, etc.
I wouldn’t discourage from using all of these but rather say, that their content is maintained by the community and the quality may vary.
FengLengshun
Er, for the game launcher, the devs don’t really want it highlighted in public for reasons you can find on their repository…
I mean, it’s a cool tool, but I’d rather let the sleeping dogs lie even if I do know that realistically the devs know about it.
AzuraVT
Yeah,absolutely should not be shared like this. the way it makes these games work will piss off the big hoyo,and fedora is just stitting here helping that happen. Good way to drive me back to Ubuntu is to disrespect developers like this
InspectorAllen
Testing software is what VM’s – Virtualbox, Gnome-Box and the like are for.