About GNU ELPA

GNU ELPA is one of the two default package archives of GNU Emacs. The other default package archive is NonGNU ELPA. Package archives host Emacs Lisp packages that you can easily install and update within Emacs. You can view the list of packages included in this archive here or via M-x list-packages in Emacs.

To report a bug, use the M-x report-emacs-bug command in Emacs. For more information on reporting bugs, see the Emacs Manual. To report package-specific bugs, prefer using M-x package-report-bug.

Note for Emacs<27 users

Older releases of Emacs require the user to manually initialize package.el. Add the following line to your init file to ensure installed packages are activated at startup:

(unless (fboundp 'package-activate-all)
  (package-initialize))

Ranking

The package index includes a Rank, representing the percentile ranking packages from most to least downloaded over the last week. We gather the data from the web server logs, so the result is not necessarily representative to actual human traffic, but should give you a rough approximating how popular a package is relative to the other packages in this archive.

ELPA-devel

By default all packages on ELPA are built and published when the maintainer makes a release. The assumption is therefore that all packages on ELPA should be stable, but it is the maintainers responsibility to ensure this.

Contrasting this, -devel (as in development) archives build and publish tarballs for each package every time maintainers publish changes that the ELPA build server detects. This can be useful if you are keen on following upstream development of a package and getting updates as soon as possible.

For maintainers, this can also be useful to get a preview of how your package will look like before a release is cut.

Badges

Every package on ELPA gets two badges (sometimes also shields). These are small images that include the package name and the latest release number, that you can link to from other websites. Here are two examples for how this looks like for AUCTeX:

To use these images yourself, we recommend you copy one of the template from below, depending on your prefer markup language (you can always infer the URL for the badge by replacing .html from the package page URL with .svg):

HTML

<a href="https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/FOO.html"><img src="https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/FOO.svg"></a>

Markdown

[![https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/FOO.svg](https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/FOO.html)]

Org mode

[[[[https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/FOO.svg]]]][https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/FOO.html]

Contact

If you need help, you could try the help-gnu-emacs mailing list. For general inquiries, please contact the emacs-devel mailing list. For questions about specific packages, it is likely best to contact the package maintainers directly.