depman

Dependency management for those who are tired of dependency management.

This tool was written to solve the problem of having to manage lots of dependencies in projects that utilize languages with no good dependency management system (i.e C and C++).

While there exist a lot of package management systems for C and C++, there are no good ones that are lightweight and work for any dependency. depman aims to provide a simple script that can be added as a git submodule or simply in-place to any repository, and provides limitless dependency management. As it is written in Python, depman will run on any platform supported by Python.

depman is a source dependency management tool, it manages dependencies by downloading and updating source repositories.

How to use depman

To use depman, you will need Python installed on your system, as well as any version control software required by your dependencies. Currently, depman only supports git, but support for Mercurial, SVN and others are planned.

You can add depman to your project as a git submodule (after running git submodule init):

git submodule add https://github.com/Mischa-Alff/depman depman

Then, you can then simply run depman with python depman/depman.py

or:

You can just add depman.py to your codebase. Then, you can then simply run depman with python path/to/depman.py

or you can add those python commands to a script, like depman.sh:

#!/bin/bash
python ./path/to/depman.py $@

Once depman is installed, you can list the dependencies present in your depman.json using python path/to/depman.py list.

You can download dependencies using

python path/to/depman.py update

and obtain more detailed information with

python path/to/depman.py --help

How to write a depman.json

The depman.json format is quite simple. Examples can be found at the examples page.

At its simplest, it's just a list of repositories to clone:

{
	"dependencies": [
		{
			"location": "https://github.com/Mischa-Alff/depman.git"
		},
		{
			"location": "https://github.com/github/linguist.git",
			"name": "gh-linguist",
			"version": "v6.3.1"
		}
	]
}

This will clone depman from the master branch into the deps/depman folder, and linguist from tag v6.3.1 into the deps/gh-linguist folder.

The deps/ folder is the default location for depman dependencies. If you'd like to change it, your depman.json file can be changed to look like this:

{
	"config": {
		"dependencies_dir": "./foodeps"
	},
	"dependencies": [
	]
}

So far, these are the values that can be used in the depman.json config section:

Name	Description
dependencies_dir	The location to store dependencies in, relative to depman.json

Building with depman

depman currenty supports building via a crude list of shell commands that can be passed per-dependency in the build option, like so:

{
	"dependencies": [
		{
			"location": "https://github.com/glfw/glfw",
			"version": "3.2.1",
			"build": [
				"cmake . -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=./install/ -DGLFW_BUILD_EXAMPLES=OFF -DGLFW_BUILD_TESTS=OFF -DGLFW_BUILD_DOCS=OFF",
				"cmake --build . --config Release",
				"cmake --build . --config Release --target INSTALL"
			]
		}
	]
}

Why not just use submodules?

Submodules in Git are notoriously bad for dependency management. They are locked to specific commits, which means if you want to develop a dependency along with a main project, you end up with having to update submodules all the time.

With depman, you can track a specific branch or tag and keep up to date with that, allowing you to lock to a specific version if needed, or stay at the tip of a branch.

What's left to do?

depman aims to be small and lightweight, the goal being to keep depman.py under 2500 lines of Python, with no external Python dependencies.

These are features I'd like to add to depman at some point: