nimble/readme.markdown

Nimble

Nimble is a beta-grade package manager for the Nim programming language.

Note: This readme explains how to install and use nimble. It does not explain how to create nimble packages. Take a look at the developers.markdown file for information regarding package creation.

Installation

You will need version 0.9.6 or better (OSX users have to use the developer version 0.10.1 or better) of the Nim compiler. To run nimble you will need to have installed some of the tools it depends on to check out source code. For instance, if a package is hosted on Github you require to have git installed and added to your environment PATH. Same goes for Mercurial repositories on Bitbucket. On Windows you will also need OpenSSL DLLs for secure network connections.

Unix

On Unix operating systems Nimble can be compiled and installed with two simple commands. After successfully grabbing the latest Nim compiler simply execute the following commands to clone nimble, compile it and then install it.

git clone https://github.com/nim-lang/nimble.git
cd nimble
nim c -r src/nimble install

After these steps nimble should be compiled and installed. You should then add ~/.nimble/bin to your $PATH. Updating nimble can then be done by executing nimble install nimble.

Windows

You can install via a pre-built installation archive which is available on the releases page or from source.

Using the pre-built archives

Download the latest release archive from the releases page. These archives will have a filename of the form nimble-x_win32 where x is the current version.

Once you download that archive unzip it and execute the install.bat file. One important thing to note is that this installation requires you have the Nim compiler in your PATH. Once the installation completes you should add C:\Users\YourName\.nimble\bin to your PATH.

From source

On Windows installing Nimble from source is slightly more complex:

git clone https://github.com/nim-lang/nimble.git
cd nimble
nim c src\nimble
cp src\nimble.exe src\nimble1.exe
src\nimble1.exe install

This is required because Windows will lock the process which is being run and during installation Nimble will recompile itself. Once the installation completes you should add C:\Users\YourName\.nimble\bin to your PATH.

Nimble's folder structure and packages

Nimble stores everything that has been installed in ~/.nimble on Unix systems and in your $home/.nimble on Windows. Libraries are stored in $nimbleDir/pkgs, and binaries are stored in $nimbleDir/bin. Most Nimble packages will provide .nim files and some documentation. The Nim compiler is aware of Nimble and will automatically find the modules so you can import modulename and have that working without additional setup.

However, some Nimble packages can provide additional tools or commands. If you don't add their location ($nimbleDir/bin) to your $PATH they will not work properly and you won't be able to run them.

Nimble usage

Once you have Nimble installed on your system you can run the nimble command to obtain a list of available commands.

nimble update

The update command is used to fetch and update the list of Nimble packages (see below). There is no automatic update mechanism, so you need to run this yourself if you need to refresh your local list of known available Nimble packages. Example:

$ nimble update
Downloading package list from https://.../packages.json
Done.

Some commands may remind you to run nimble update or will run it for you if they fail.

You can also optionally supply this command with a URL if you would like to use a third-party package list.

nimble install

The install command will download and install a package. You need to pass the name of the package (or packages) you want to install. If any of the packages depend on other Nimble packages Nimble will also install them. Example:

$ nimble install nake
Downloading nake into /tmp/nimble/nake...
Executing git...
...
nake installed successfully

Nimble always fetches and installs the latest version of a package. Note that latest version is defined as the latest tagged version in the git (or hg) repository, if the package has no tagged versions then the latest commit in the remote repository will be installed. If you already have that version installed Nimble will ask you whether you wish it to overwrite your local copy.

You can force Nimble to download the latest commit from the package's repo, for example:

$ nimble install nimgame@#head

This is of course git specific, for hg use tip instead of head. A branch, tag, or commit hash may also be specified in the place of head.

Instead of specifying a VCS branch you may also specify a version range, for example:

$ nimble install nimgame@"> 0.5"

In this case a version which is greater than 0.5 will be installed.

If you don't specify a parameter and there is a package.nimble file in your current working directory then Nimble will install the package residing in the current working directory. This can be useful for developers who are testing locally their .nimble files before submitting them to the official package list. See developers.markdown for more info on this.

A URL to a repository can also be specified, Nimble will automatically detect the type of the repository that the url points to and install it.

nimble uninstall

The uninstall command will remove an installed package. Attempting to remove a package which other packages depend on is disallowed and will result in an error. You must currently manually remove the reverse dependencies first.

Similar to the install command you can specify a version range, for example:

$ nimble uninstall nimgame@0.5

nimble build

The build command is mostly used by developers who want to test building their .nimble package. This command will build the package in debug mode, without installing anything. The install command will build the package in release mode instead.

If you are a developer willing to produce new Nimble packages please read the developers.markdown file for detailed information.

nimble c

The c (or compile, js, cc, cpp) command can be used by developers to compile individual modules inside their package. All options passed to Nimble will also be passed to the Nim compiler during compilation.

Nimble will use the backend specified in the package's .nimble file if the command c or compile is specified. The more specific js, cc, cpp can be used to override that.

nimble list

The list command will display the known list of packages available for Nimble. An optional --ver parameter can be specified to tell Nimble to query remote git repositories for the list of versions of the packages and to then print the versions. Please note however that this can be slow as each package must be queried separately.

nimble search

If you don't want to go through the whole output of the list command you can use the search command specifying as parameters the package name and/or tags you want to filter. Nimble will look into the known list of available packages and display only those that match the specified keywords (which can be substrings). Example:

$ nimble search math
linagl:
  url:         https://bitbucket.org/BitPuffin/linagl (hg)
  tags:        library, opengl, math, game
  description: OpenGL math library
  license:     CC0

extmath:
  url:         git://github.com/achesak/extmath.nim (git)
  tags:        library, math, trigonometry
  description: Nim math library
  license:     MIT

Searches are case insensitive.

An optional --ver parameter can be specified to tell Nimble to query remote git repositories for the list of versions of the packages and to then print the versions. Please note however that this can be slow as each package must be queried separately.

nimble path

The nimble path command will show the absolute path to the installed packages matching the specified parameters. Since there can be many versions of the same package installed, the path command will always show the latest version. Example:

$ nimble path argument_parser
/home/user/.nimble/pkgs/argument_parser-0.1.2

Under Unix you can use backticks to quickly access the directory of a package, which can be useful to read the bundled documentation. Example:

$ pwd
/usr/local/bin
$ cd `nimble path argument_parser`
$ less README.md

nimble init

The nimble init command will start a simple wizard which will create a quick .nimble file for your project.

Configuration

At startup Nimble will attempt to read ~/.config/nimble/nimble.ini on Linux (on Windows it will attempt to read C:\Users\<YourUser>\AppData\Roaming\nimble\nimble.ini).

The format of this file corresponds to the ini format with some Nim enhancements. For example:

nimbleDir = r"C:\Nimble\"

You can currently configure the following in this file:

• nimbleDir - The directory which nimble uses for package installation. Default: ~/.nimble/
• chcp - Whether to change the current code page when executing Nim application packages. If true this will add chcp 65001 to the .cmd stubs generated in ~/.nimble/bin/. Default: true

Packages

Nimble works on git repositories as its primary source of packages. Its list of packages is stored in a JSON file which is freely accessible in the nim-lang/packages repository. This JSON file provides nimble with the required Git URL to clone the package and install it. Installation and build instructions are contained inside a ini-style file with the .nimble file extension. The nimble file shares the package's name.

Contribution

If you would like to help, feel free to fork and make any additions you see fit and then send a pull request. If you are a developer willing to produce new Nimble packages please read the developers.markdown file for detailed information.

If you have any questions about the project you can ask me directly on github, ask on the Nim forum, or ask on Freenode in the #nim channel.

About

Nimble has been written by Dominik Picheta with help from a number of contributors. It is licensed under the BSD license (Look at license.txt for more info).