Inofficial Package Manager for Zig

DISCLAIMER 1: This is not an official package manager for Zig. It's just something to bridge the time between now and the official package manager release.

DISCLAIMER 2: Package versioning is out of scope for ZPM. Having "stable" packages for an unstable programming language seems unreasonable to me. Zig will still have frequent breaking changes, so keeping all our dependencies up-to-date is imho a must.

Concept

Basic Idea

The ZPM is based around two features:

Git Submodules
The GitHub Topic zig-package

Using the GitHub API, you can search for all Repositories in the topic zig-package which allows us to verify how the repo is called, if there are forks or several versions.

Planned Features

ZPM should allow the following things:

Add submodules into a directory in a project
Provide a file packages.zig for build.zig that exposes all downloaded packages as std.build.Pkg objects
Recursive submodule initialization

Planned CLI

ZPM will be a command line application with an interface similar to git or zig with the following commands:

`zpm search <words>`

Searches for repositories tagged with . This allows searching for certain key words like network, gui, …

ZPM will then output a list of all found projects including a fork hierarchy if available.

`zpm install <repo>`

Tries to install to your current package colleciton. is either only the repository name (like zig-network) or the full name (like MasterQ32/zig-network).

When using the full name, exactly this repo will be cloned from master branch and will be added to your packages.

When using the repo name only, ZPM will do the following:

If only a single repository exists: Install this repo
If a single root project with several forks exist, ask the user if the want ot install the root or an explicit fork. Do what they chose.
If multiple non-fork projects exist with the same name, ask the user to chose from a list.

Building

Clone the repository
Run git submodule update --init --recursive
Run zig build

Runtime Requirements for ZPM

Have git or git.exe in your path
Have network access

Debugging

List all repositories

curl -H 'Accept: application/vnd.github.mercy-preview+json' \
  'https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=topic:zig-package' \
| jq '.items[].full_name'

kliberty/zpm