Sharing a modlist (metapackages)

One of the many things CKAN can do is share your list of installed mods with another user by using metapackages. As a standard CKAN generates a metapackage of all your installed mods in ...//CKAN/installed-default.ckan

If you want to share your currently modlist with someone or take a snapshot of the stuff you have installed right now for a given KSP installation you can just copy that file and share/keep it.

Creating a custom metapackage

The easy way (recommended)

*Install the mods you want your metapackage to contain

*Go to the CKAN folder within your KSP root directory and copy installed-default.ckan

*Paste the file wherever you want and change the name to something of your choosing

The slightly harder way

Metapackages are much like normal .ckan files but have an added

"kind": "metapackage",

Metapackages also only depend on other mods rather than defining the installation of a specific mod from a specific place.

An example of an empty metapackage is

{
"spec_version": "v1.6",
"identifier": "YourMetapackageName",
"version": "1",
"license": "unknown",
"name": "User friendly name of your metapackage",
"abstract": "A short description of the metapackage",
"kind": "metapackage",
"depends": []
}

NOTE: Metapackage support was added in CKAN 1.6.0 so "spec_version" must always be at least v1.6!

And an example of a metapackage that installs FAR,KER and KAC would look like this

{
"spec_version": "v1.6",
"identifier": "YourMetapackageName",
"version": "1",
"license": "unknown",
"name": "User friendly name of your metapackage",
"abstract": "A short description of the metapackage",
"kind": "metapackage",
"depends": [
    {
        "name": "FerramAerospaceResearch",
    },
	{
        "name": "KerbalEngineerRedux",
    },
    {
        "name": "KerbalAlarmClock",
    }
]
}

Metapackages will solve dependencies for mods within them. The above example also installs ModuleManager since FAR depends on it.

Metapackages will not show suggestions and recommendations from the mods within them.

Installing a metapackage

GUI

You start by clicking "File"->"Install from .ckan"

This will open up a dialog window where you select your .ckan and then click "Open"

After selecting the file installation will ensue just like when installing other mods through CKAN.

Command line

Installing a metapackage through the command line is done via the following command

ckan install -c path/to/metapackage.ckan