Catalogs

Where packages come from, and how to add, order, and authenticate to more of them.

What a catalog is

A catalog is an ordered, named source of package manifests. There are two types:

• oci — an OCI registry reference, mirrored locally. This is how the official catalog is distributed.
• dir — a local directory laid out as pkgs/<name>/pkg.yaml, mainly for authoring a catalog before publishing it.

On first run, nem configures the official catalog for you. It’s a plain entry like any other — removable, reorderable, disable-able — with no special reserved status.

Lookup order

Catalogs are searched in configuration order, and the first one that has a package wins. A [<catalog>:] prefix on a tool in nem.toml (for example nem use mycatalog:kubectl) pins that tool to one specific catalog, skipping the rest.

A disabled catalog keeps its slot in the order but is skipped by lookups — disabling one and re-enabling it later doesn’t change where it sits relative to the others.

Managing catalogs

nem catalog add <name> <ref>      # --type oci|dir; default: auto-detect
nem catalog list
nem catalog remove <name>
nem catalog reorder <name>...     # every configured catalog, exactly once
nem catalog update [name]         # sync oci catalogs from their remote
nem catalog enable <name>...
nem catalog disable <name>...

nem catalog add auto-detects the type from the reference unless you pass --type. reorder rewrites the whole precedence list at once — it expects every configured catalog named exactly once. update re-syncs oci catalogs against their remote; dir catalogs are read live from disk and need no updating.

All of this is stored in $NEM_HOME/config.yaml, and hand-editing the file works just as well as the commands above. See the config.yaml reference for the full file format.

Authentication

OCI registries use standard Docker credentials — nem has no authentication store of its own. Run docker login <registry> to set up access, and nem picks up the same credentials.