Using cask for package management

Question

I am new to emacs. I'm trying to use cask to manage emacs packages.

This is my ~/.emacs.d/init.el:

(require 'cask "~/etsi/cask/cask.el")
(cask-initialize "~/etsi")

(require 'evil)
(evil-mode 1)

~/etsi/Cask file:

(source "melpa" "http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/")
(source "gnu" "http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/")

(depends-on "evil")

However, it does not seem to work. For example, whenever I open a file, there seems to be no evil mode. (Yes I add cask binary to $PATH and ran cask install.)

Looking at other people's publicly available dotfiles, I see they use Cask too and do the same or similar things, so I'm not sure what I did wrong.

I also tried the following for ~/.emacs.d/init.el:

(require 'package)
(require 'cask "~/etsi/cask/cask.el")
(package-initialize)
(cask-initialize "~/etsi")

(require 'evil)
(evil-mode 1)

which also does not work.

---

Why?

Because I am new to emacs, perhaps I'm doing it wrong, and explaining what exactly I'm trying to achieve might bring forward a more straightforward solution.

Instead of manually M-x package-install RET <package-name> RET for each and every package, I want to simply put a list of them somewhere (in a text file), and have something automatically install them all (and take care of initalization). This is because I want to replicate my emacs setup across multiple machines, and obviously doing M-x package-install RET <package-name> RET for each package on each machine is not desirable.

I thought cask was the correct tool for this, since you can have a Cask file to list your packages. And just use the cask install command to install them. When I ran cask install, it did download and "install" (to .cask directory) evil and its dependencies. But emacs does not seem to load it?

I also tried (add-to-list 'load-path (cask-load-path ((cask-initialize "~/etsi")))) instead of (cask-initialize "~/etsi"), but that did not work either.

Is el-get the right tool for the job instead? Reading the introductory documentation, it wasn't clear that it was, hence why I chose clask, because their documentation specifically said "If you are using Cask for your Emacs configuration [...]".

Edit: Maybe I'm checking for evil mode wrong? Is there a reliable way to check for the existence of a package, i.e. whether or not it has been loaded? I'm checking for evil by just pressing j, or searching for evil mode help with C-h evil.

Answer 1

Here's how I do it: packages.el.

Cite some code, it's nothing too complex:

;; install required
(dolist (package ora-packages)
  (unless (package-installed-p package)
    (package-install package)))
;; upgrade installed
(save-window-excursion
  (package-list-packages t)
  (package-menu-mark-upgrades)
  (condition-case nil
      (package-menu-execute t)
    (error
     (package-menu-execute))))

And how to use it:

emacs -batch -l packages.el

That's it, after this single shell command all packages from the ora-packages variable will be installed/upgraded.

I have this tied into my Emacs startup, if I want to start Emacs with an upgrade, I type make up. To start without an upgrade, I type make run.