ELPA is a package manager of Emacs. It becomes a built-in package since version 24.0.
So, what I want to do is installing an ELPA package without opening Emacs.
First, let's create a script named install.el.
(require 'package)
; find package information from following archives
(setq package-archives '(("gnu" . "http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/")
("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/")
("melpa" . "http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/")))
(package-initialize)
(mapcar (lambda (package)
; install package if not already installed
(unless (package-installed-p package)
(package-install package)))
; list of packages to be installed
'(yasnippet
color-theme))
To invoke the script, use command
emacs --script install.el
--script option tells emacs to run the given script without showing the GUI interface,
which is quite useful when we simply want to run some emacs-lisp outside Emacs.
For more details of my Emacs configuration, please visit: https://github.com/fuqcool/emacs-setting