Best alternatives to home-maker in 2026

Setting up a new development machine usually means retracing your steps from memory: which package manager did I use for that CLI tool, which version, was there a special install script? home-maker's answer is to make that list explicit and reusable — write your tools into a Makefile once, and reinstalling your whole toolkit on a new machine becomes a single command instead of an afternoon of guesswork. home-maker is a small, MIT-licensed, open-source tool built around Make and Bash that wraps multiple package managers (apt, cargo, uv, go, npm) behind one declarative interface, adds an interactive fuzzy-search installer via fzf, supports version pinning, and lets you write custom install scripts for tools that don't fit a standard package manager. Tools can be grouped by purpose (cli, dev, etc.), and targets are discovered live from the Makefile itself. It's aimed at Linux/Debian-based developers who want their machine setup to be reproducible and documented rather than something that lives only in their head.