Auto install emacs packages with MELPA

Question

I want to declare all packages that I want to use in emacs in a init.el file. I wonder if its possible to load the missing packages with e.g. MELPA when I startup e

Answer 1

Here's my answer to a similar question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/14838150/245173. The code will automatically install missing packages, but won't update existing ones, so only the first startup is slow.