Russet

Russet is an independent project with a native Rust implementation of AutoPkg's recipe engine, CLI, and 46 built-in processors. It targets macOS, Windows, and Linux without bundling Python or using a Python bridge. Native system tools remain dependencies for operations such as packaging, disk-image mounting, and signature verification.

Russet hasn't published a release yet; the first release will be 0.1.0. Until then, build an archive from source as the installation guide describes. The included installer installs the native command as russet and supports rollback to the previous installation.

Compatibility targets AutoPkg commit c36e58f and Munki 7.2.0.5787. Existing recipes using supported built-ins retain their processor names and formats. Custom Python processors and non-FileRepo Munki backends are unsupported and are rejected before recipe execution. Operations that require a platform-specific tool remain limited to that platform; no compatibility promise is made for older operating-system images outside the CI matrix.

Russet distribution versions are independent of the AutoPkg compatibility version. For recipe compatibility, russet version reports 3.0.0. A release archive's RELEASE.json records its build identity and validation provenance.

Russet also includes native ports of 12 primary-repository processors and one shared-recipe alias, for 58 implementations under 59 names. See community processor support for the pinned sources and compatibility boundaries.

Source and development

The Rust implementation lives in rust/, and the frozen compatibility contract that it builds against lives in compatibility/. Scripts/ holds the shell and PowerShell checks that CI runs on installed archives. This repository contains no Python.

The suites that compare Russet with Python AutoPkg live in russet-compat, along with their results, such as the live upstream recipe results for 228 recipe attempts and the 94-recipe follow-up for the community processors.

The Russet documentation covers installation, recipe workflows, Munki imports, and the command-line reference. Its source lives in website/; see its README to build and preview it.

All tests run on GitHub-hosted Actions runners. The supported runner images are macos-15, macos-15-intel, windows-2025, and ubuntu-24.04. See Contributing for the validation and release workflows.

Attribution and license

Russet implements AutoPkg's recipe interface, and its compatibility contract is derived from AutoPkg's Apache-2.0 source. The project uses the Apache License 2.0. Vendored dependencies retain their own license files, which are also included in distribution archives.