Babel

Babel is a beta-grade package manager for the Nimrod programming language.

Installation

You will need the latest Nimrod compiler from github to compile babel (version 0.9.2 may work).

Once you have the latest Nimrod compiler you can compile babel by executing: nimrod c -d:release babel. Then simply install babel by executing ./babel install. You should then add ~/.babel/bin to your $PATH.

Note: On Windows you must rename babel.exe to babel1.exe and subsequently run babel1.exe install. This is because Windows will lock the process which is being run.

Babel's folder structure and packages

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

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

Babel usage

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

babel update

The update command is used to fetch and update the list of Babel 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 Babel packages. Example:

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

Some commands may remind you to run babel 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.

babel 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 Babel packages Babel will also install them. Example:

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

Babel 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 Babel will ask you whether you wish it to overwrite your local copy.

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

$ babel 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.

If you don't specify a parameter and there is a package.babel file in your current working directory Babel will install the package residing in the current working directory. This can be useful for developers who are testing locally their .babel 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, Babel will automatically detect the type of the repository that the url points to and install it.

babel build

The build command is mostly used by developers who want to test building their .babel package. The install command calls build implicitly, so there is rarely any reason to use this command directly.

babel list

The list command will display the known list of packages available for Babel. An optional --ver parameter can be specified to tell Babel 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.

babel 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. Babel will look into the known list of available packages and display only those that match the specified keywords (which can be substrings). Example:

$ babel 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: Nimrod math library
  license:     MIT

Searches are case insensitive.

An optional --ver parameter can be specified to tell Babel 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.

babel path

The babel 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:

$ babel path argument_parser
/home/user/.babel/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 `babel path argument_parser`
$ less README.md

Packages

Babel 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 nimrod-code/packages repository. This JSON file provides babel 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 .babel file extension. The babel 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 Babel 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 nimrod forum, or ask on Freenode in the #nimrod channel.

About

Babel 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).