topgrade

topgrade is a system-wide upgrade tool that detects and runs all the updaters available on your machine in a single pass. Instead of remembering to run brew upgrade, apt upgrade, rustup update, pip install --upgrade, nvim --headless +PlugUpdate, and a dozen other commands separately, topgrade chains them all together and gives you a unified view of what was updated and what (if anything) failed.

Features

• Comprehensive detection — automatically discovers what package managers, language toolchains, and tools are installed and runs the appropriate update command for each
• Cross-platform — works on Linux, macOS, and Windows, adapting to whatever is present on each system
• Dozens of supported systems — covers apt, brew, dnf, pacman, nix, cargo, rustup, pip, npm, gem, go, composer, conda, flatpak, snap, and many more
• Editor plugins — updates plugins in Vim/Neovim (vim-plug, lazy.nvim, packer), Emacs (DOOM, Spacemacs), VS Code, and others
• Shell plugins — updates oh-my-zsh, prezto, fisher, and other shell plugin frameworks
• Configurable — disable specific steps, set custom commands, and add your own upgrade scripts via a TOML config file
• Dry-run mode — see what would be run without actually running anything

Installation

cargo install topgrade

Or via your system package manager:

# Debian / Ubuntu (Debian 13+)
apt install topgrade

# Fedora
dnf install topgrade

# macOS
brew install topgrade

# Arch Linux
pacman -S topgrade

# Nix
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.topgrade

Usage

# Run all detected upgrade steps
topgrade

# Show what would be run without executing anything
topgrade --dry-run

# Run only specific steps
topgrade --only brew,cargo,rustup

# Disable specific steps for this run
topgrade --disable pip,gem

# Don't ask for confirmation before running
topgrade --yes

Example output

topgrade runs each step in sequence and prints a clear header and result for each one:

─────────────────────────────────── System ────────────────────────────────────
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
...
─────────────────────────────────── Rustup ────────────────────────────────────
rustup update
info: syncing channel updates for 'stable-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu'
info: checking for self-update
  stable-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu updated - rustc 1.82.0
─────────────────────────────────── Cargo ─────────────────────────────────────
Running cargo install-update -a
...
─────────────────────────────────── Summary ───────────────────────────────────
✔  System
✔  Rustup
✔  Cargo
✔  Node packages (npm)
✔  Oh My Zsh
✔  Neovim plugins

Configuration

Topgrade reads from ~/.config/topgrade.toml. Use it to disable noisy steps, add custom commands, or tweak behaviour:

# Don't ask for sudo password prompt preamble
set_title = false

# Disable steps you don't want
[disable]
# pip3 = true
# gem  = true

# Run custom commands as extra steps
[commands]
"Sync dotfiles" = "cd ~/.dotfiles && git pull --rebase"
"Update fonts"  = "fc-cache -fv"

# Don't clean up after brew
[brew]
cleanup = false

# Use a specific Python for pip upgrades
[pip3]
use_pip3 = true

Supported steps (selection)

Tips

• Add topgrade to a weekly cron job or launchd timer to keep everything up to date automatically
• Use --disable to skip steps that require a VPN or that are slow on a particular day
• Combine with --yes in unattended/CI scenarios where interactive prompts are not possible