The developers of the OpenWrt distribution, aimed at use in various network devices such as routers, switches and access points, announced the transition to the APK package manager, developed by the Alpine project. In the November snapshots created on the basis of the main OpenWrt branch that is in development, the previously used opkg package manager has already been replaced by the apk toolkit.
The OpenWrt 24.10 test branch continues to use opkg for now, but will soon be migrated to APK (OpenWrt 24.10 will be the first APK-based release). The OpenWrt 23.05 stable branch will continue to use opkg until the end of its maintenance. Once the migration to the new package manager is complete, opkg will be deprecated and will no longer be developed as part of the OpenWrt project. The transition to APK will expand the package management capabilities, and will also lead to changes in the methods of installing and working with packages.
APK by default (if you do not specify the "--allow-untrusted" option) requires valid digital signatures for all packages, while opkg does not check for locally installed packages. Some opkg operations that required running different commands can be reduced to a single command in apk (for example, there is no need to update the cache with repository information separately, i.e. instead of "opkg update && opkg install dnsmasq-full" you can run "apk --update-cache add dnsmasq-full"). Among the advanced capabilities of APK, there is also the "apk list --installed --orphaned" command, which allows you to view all unused dependencies that can be removed without harming the system.
Comparison of some apk and opkg commands for performing typical actions:
Source: opennet.ru
