APK was developed by Alpine Linux and is the package manager used in OpenWrt 25.12 and newer. This replaced the former package manager opkg which ended development. Note that apk has nothing to do with Android or other systems that may use the same acronym.
Useful references:
apk update Update local package database
apk add <package> Install a package
apk add <package>* Install packages using a mask
apk add --allow-untrusted ./<package>.apk Install packages you built yourself or downloaded from an external repo
apk add --allow-untrusted ./*.apk Install packages you built yourself using a mask
apk del <package> Uninstall a package
apk del <package>* Uninstall packages using a mask
apk list -I List installed packages
apk list -a [<package>*] List available packages [using a mask]
apk search [<needle>*] Find packages [using a needle]
To update your package database and install multiple packages simply list any packages you want in one command as follows:
apk -U add package1 package2 package3
This file contains the package repository database URLs. Note that lines starting with # are comments:
cat /etc/apk/repositories.d/distfeeds.list
$ cat /etc/apk/repositories.d/distfeeds.list https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/25.12/targets/x86/64/packages/packages.adb https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/25.12/packages/x86_64/base/packages.adb https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/25.12/targets/x86/64/kmods/6.12.60-1-41eae5d636a323424ce95c71d55e15f0/packages.adb https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/25.12/packages/x86_64/luci/packages.adb https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/25.12/packages/x86_64/packages/packages.adb https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/25.12/packages/x86_64/routing/packages.adb https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/25.12/packages/x86_64/telephony/packages.adb https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/25.12/packages/x86_64/video/packages.adb
To include custom feeds in a file that will be retained over upgrades, add new entries to the customfeeds.dist file:
$ cat /etc/apk/repositories.d/customfeeds.list # add your custom package feeds here # # http://www.example.com/path/to/files/packages.adb https://dev.melmac.net/apk/packages.adb
Read this warning carefully before proceeding:
Do not use apk upgrade to blindly mass-update your packages!
Doing so will sooner or later brick your device. Several packages may have various missing conflicts, incomplete dependencies or are otherwise specified incorrectly, which will cause a misconfiguration if you blindly upgrade them (hostapd-*, wpad-*, ucode-mod-*, various libraries, and others).
The only safe way to upgrade all packages is to sysupgrade to a new firmware which would have a coherent set of current packages. You can use one of the ASU clients (LuCI Attended Sysupgrade, owut, or Firmware Selector), use the imagebuilder, or full toolchain to locally compile the firmware image by yourself at your Linux buildhost.
Consider doing a backup first. With that said, if you still want to update packages: apk upgrade searches online repositories for package updates and upgrades them.
Apk uses the environment variables http_proxy and https_proxy for proxy support. For a one-off operation you can set it on the command line:
$ https_proxy=http://yourproxyserver:3128/ apk upgrade
OpenWrt 25.12 onward uses apk version 3. Be aware that some other Linux distros and tooling may still be on version 2, so make sure any man pages or tools you're running are version 3 before you try to apply what you learn there to OpenWrt. For example, Alpine Linux is on version 3, but Wolfi, Apko, Melange, and Chainguard may still use apk version 2 so there would be internal/external differences etc.
apk adbdump produces non-standard YAML in certain edge cases. If you run into this, please report it here.