| src | ||
| tests | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| changelog.markdown | ||
| developers.markdown | ||
| license.txt | ||
| nimble.nimble | ||
| readme.markdown | ||
| todo.markdown | ||
Nimble
Nimble is a beta-grade package manager for the Nimrod 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 Nimrod
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 Nimrod compiler simply execute the following commands to clone nimble, compile it and then install it.
git clone https://github.com/nimrod-code/nimble.git
cd nimble
nimrod 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
On Windows installing Nimble is slightly more complex:
git clone https://github.com/nimrod-code/nimble.git
cd nimble
nimrod 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.
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 $nimbleDir/bin. Most Nimble
packages will provide .nim files and some documentation. The Nimrod
compiler is aware of Nimble and will automatically find the modules so you can
import modulename and have that working without additional setup.
However, some Nimble packages can provide additional tools or commands. If you
don't add their location ($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. The install command calls build implicitly,
so there is rarely any reason to use this command directly.
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: Nimrod 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
Configuration
At startup Nimble will attempt to read $AppDir/nimble/nimble.ini,
where $AppDir is ~/.config/ on Linux and
C:\Users\<YourUser>\AppData\Roaming\ on Windows.
The format of this file corresponds to the ini format with some Nimrod 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/
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
nimrod-code/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 nimrod forum, or ask on Freenode in the #nimrod 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).