cotton: A Rust repository from reicheltp

Simple and speedy package manager

Simple: Cotton works with web applications, including those built with React, Next.js, Vite, TypeScript, ESLint, and more.

Speedy: Cotton aggressively employs parallel operations, maximizing network and disk throughput, without sacrificing efficiency or simplicity. With a fast network, cotton install runs faster than rm -rf node_modules.

Trouble free: Inspired by Cargo, Cotton ensures that all dependencies are installed correctly when performing operations or executing package scripts.

Installation

Install from source

cargo install --git https://github.com/danielhuang/cotton

Install compiled artifact (Linux-only)

Download and install the compiled binary:

curl -f#SL --compressed --tlsv1.2 https://api.cirrus-ci.com/v1/artifact/github/danielhuang/cotton/Build/binaries/target/release/cotton > /usr/local/bin/cotton
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/cotton

If glibc is not installed or is not a recent version, download and install a statically linked (musl) artifact:

curl -f#SL https://nightly.link/danielhuang/cotton/workflows/build/master/Binary.zip > cotton.zip
unzip -o cotton.zip
unzip -o cotton_null_x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.zip

This will install to the current directory.

Get started

Install packages

cotton install

This will install packages to node_modules and save cotton.lock if needed.

Run a script

To run the start script:

cotton run start

To automatically restart the script when package.json changes:

cotton run start --watch package.json

Unlike other package managers, Cotton does not require installing packages before running scripts. Missing packages will be installed on-demand automatically.

Update package versions

cotton update

This will load the latest available versions of dependencies (including transitive dependencies) and save registry information to cotton.lock. Specified versions in package.json are not modified.

Comparison with other package managers

Installing packages used by create-react-app:

Tool	Initial install	With lockfile only	With lockfile and cache
Cotton	6.1s	2.7s	1.1s
pnpm	19.1s	21.5s	5.5s
Yarn	40.9s	26.8s	13.9s
npm	45.7s	28.4s	13.4s

See benchmark for more information.

Note: Cotton uses an internal per-project cache stored within node_modules. This is done to ensure that the cache is located in the same filesystem in order to allow hardlink installation.

Limitations

Cotton does not currently support Git repositories, direct urls, or local paths as dependencies
Cotton does not execute postinstall scripts after installation

reicheltp/cotton