Alpine Package Keeper (APK) Versioning

Identifier

apk

References

• Alpine Linux package policies
• Alpine Package Keeper - Package pinning

Ranges/Constraints

✅ Ranges are supported.

Valid rangeStrategy values are: bump, pin, replace

Description

Alpine Package Keeper (APK) versioning is used for packages served from APK repositories, such as the official Alpine Linux repositories or the Wolfi APK package repository

This implementation follows the Alpine Linux Package versions for version formatting.

Versions are similar to other Linux distributions, e.g. 3.2.1-r0

• The first segment follows semantic versioning
• Alpha, release candidates (_rc2), etc are prefixed with an underscore, not a hyphen.
• Subsequent package versions are -r0, -r1, and so on; the number is from $pkgver.
• Subsequent package fixes are _p0, _p1 (typically seen if not using major.minor.patch, e.g. 6.5_p20250503-r0)

Version Format Examples

• 2.39.0-r0 - Standard version with release number
• 2.39.0_rc1-r0 - Release candidate (pre-release)
• 6.5_p20250503-r0 - Package fix with date-based patch

Pre-release Handling

• _rc patterns (e.g., _rc1, _rc2) are treated as pre-release identifiers
• _p patterns (e.g., _p20250503) are treated as part of the version number

Version constraints

Constraints follow apk-world(5), which builds the operator from its characters, so the characters may be given in any order and may repeat. This means ~, =~ and ~= all mean the same thing.

Operator	Meaning
(none)	exact version
=	exact version
<	less than
<=	less than or equal
>	greater than
>=	greater than or equal
~	prefix match
>~	greater than or prefix match
<~	less than or prefix match

A prefix match compares token by token rather than by string, so ~1.6 matches 1.6, 1.6.0_pre1, 1.6.0, 1.6.5 and 1.6.9_p1, but not 1.60. Because a revision is a token of its own, ~8.12.1 matches every 8.12.1-rN, which is how Wolfi and Chainguard images commonly pin their packages.

Renovate keeps the precision a prefix constraint was written with, so ~8.12.1 becomes ~8.13.0 rather than ~8.13.0-r0, and ~8.12 becomes ~8.13.

With rangeStrategy=bump, Renovate raises a lower bound which includes its boundary to the new version, so >=8.12.1 becomes >=8.13.0-r0 and >~8.12 becomes >~8.13.0-r0. A bare > is left alone, as >8.13.0-r0 would exclude the very version it was bumped to, and < and <= are upper bounds so there is nothing to raise.

Otherwise Renovate does not propose a replacement for the <, <=, >, >=, >~ and <~ operators, as there is no single obvious new bound for them. The >< operator constrains a package to an identity hash rather than to a version, so it is not a version constraint Renovate can resolve.

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