Being emacs, there's a bunch of different ways to do this. I use Cask: https://cask.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide/installation.html https://cask.readthedocs.i

Being emacs, there's a bunch of different ways to do this. I use Cask: https://cask.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide/installation.html https://cask.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide/installation.htm... Let's consider Homebrew bundle etc outside of scope and assume you have some workflow that works for you to init a new machine with emacs and some other apps, and you're just worried about the zillions of little emacs packages you are testing or using. So, I have a file called at ~/.emacs.d/Cask, that is just a list of packages on which I depend. This is the only way I install packages. Update the file and do "cask install". This also means if you're packages get weird, or you have some sort of transient .elc problem you can just blow away ~/.emacs.d/.cask and do a 'cask install' (basically .cask ~= node_modules)