Distribution oriented templating system

The problem this project tries to mitigate is "portable" scripting for variety of operating systems (currently Linux distributions only) in the wild. While writing an "universal" script, one needs to take into account small or bigger differences among operating systems (like package installation tools, versions of utilities, expected directories for binaries, libraries, etc.).

The distgen project is thus something like database of OS differences together with convenience tool-set that allows you to instantiate valid script for particular distribution. The concept is to have template file (mostly raw jinja2 template) together with "declarative" spec file (YAML file) that fulfils the needs of particular template.

You can find distgen documentation at http://distgen.readthedocs.io.

Download/Installation

Stable releases of distgen are available as RPMs in Fedora and EPEL repositories, and in pypi:

$ sudo dnf install distgen

$ pip install distgen

Development (git snapshot) RPMs are automatically built in Fedora Copr.

You can also run development version directly from git, simply use the dg shell wrapper available in this git root directory.

Example with Dockerfile

Typical example is the need to instantiate working FOO package oriented Dockerfiles for all supported Fedora/RHEL versions.

To achieve that goal with distgen, you need to write something like docker.tpl template and FOO.yaml spec file. If the system-default docker.tpl template is good enough, its enough to write proper spec file:

create FOO.yaml spec:

$ cat FOO.yaml
maintainer: John Doe <jdoe@example.com>
parts:
  pkginstall:
    data:
      - type: pkg
        action: install
        packages:
          - vim
  footer:
    cmd: ["vim"]

Run dg tool to generate Fedora 22 Dockerfile:

$ dg --template docker.tpl \
     --spec FOO.yaml \
     --distro fedora-22-x86_64.yaml \
> Dockerfile
$ cat Dockerfile
FROM index.docker.io/fedora:22
MAINTAINER John Doe <jdoe@example.com>

ENV container="docker"

RUN dnf -y --setopt=tsflags=nodocs install vim \
    && dnf -y --setopt=tsflags=nodocs clean all --enablerepo='*'

CMD ["vim"]

Run dg tool again to generate RHEL 7 dockerfile:

$ dg --template docker.tpl \
     --spec FOO.yaml \
     --distro rhel-7-x86_64.yaml \
> Dockerfile
$ cat Dockerfile
FROM registry.access.redhat.com/rhel7
MAINTAINER John Doe <jdoe@example.com>

ENV container="docker"

RUN yum -y --setopt=tsflags=nodocs install vim \
    && yum -y --setopt=tsflags=nodocs clean all --enablerepo='*'

CMD ["vim"]

Release files for distgen 2.4

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for distgen 2.4
File	Size	Uploaded
distgen-2.4.tar.gz	85.9 kB	Jul 14, 2026	Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for distgen 2.4
File	Interpreter	ABI	Platform	Reset
distgen-2.4-py3-none-any.whl 54.2 kB Jul 14, 2026	Python 3	none	any	Details

Total release size: 140.1 kB

Release files / distgen-2.4.tar.gz

Download URL	distgen-2.4.tar.gz
Size	85.9 kB
Tags	Source
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`e176991785a61a1a06810dca96080858b1c0ca965803c42990dec044c8a3a0fb`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`b8bea9330e92b8955cd9de81a61947a470262f1385033e5e8393e8dfad1c7a35`
Upload date	Jul 14, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	Yes
Uploaded via	`twine/6.1.0 CPython/3.13.12`

Provenance

Provenance describes where a file came from. On PyPI, provenance is shared via attestations, which provide a verifiable record of the build or publishing details. View details, limitations and caveats.

Identity

Publishing platform: GitHub Actions
Publishing repository: github.com/devexp-db/distgen
Publishing commit: github.com/devexp-db/distgen/tree/d66918bae2c7f01a94895690ebb8b752a2ce90e3

Workflow

Publishing configuration: github.com/devexp-db/distgen/blob/d66918bae2c7f01a94895690ebb8b752a2ce90e3/.github/workflows/pypi-publish.yml
Publishing logs: github.com/devexp-db/distgen/actions/runs/29326080345/attempts/1

Artifact

Subject: distgen-2.4.tar.gz
SHA-256 checksum: e176991785a61a1a06810dca96080858b1c0ca965803c42990dec044c8a3a0fb Verifying attestations

Release files / distgen-2.4-py3-none-any.whl

Download URL	distgen-2.4-py3-none-any.whl
Size	54.2 kB
Tags	Python 3
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`ff503aac8944d3408c68a0ed2a5a3b2715ec70d586f5e895d3ad47bec490ad2a`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`59670661f298172026235a32fa9a648a027c3b9b51d3c8d2de19ad68078faed6`
Upload date	Jul 14, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	Yes
Uploaded via	`twine/6.1.0 CPython/3.13.12`

Provenance

Identity

Publishing platform: GitHub Actions
Publishing repository: github.com/devexp-db/distgen
Publishing commit: github.com/devexp-db/distgen/tree/d66918bae2c7f01a94895690ebb8b752a2ce90e3

Workflow

Publishing configuration: github.com/devexp-db/distgen/blob/d66918bae2c7f01a94895690ebb8b752a2ce90e3/.github/workflows/pypi-publish.yml
Publishing logs: github.com/devexp-db/distgen/actions/runs/29326080345/attempts/1

Artifact

Subject: distgen-2.4-py3-none-any.whl
SHA-256 checksum: ff503aac8944d3408c68a0ed2a5a3b2715ec70d586f5e895d3ad47bec490ad2a Verifying attestations