Nimble is a beta-grade package manager for the Nim programming language.
Interested in learning how to create a package? Skip directly to that section here.
You will need version 0.9.6 or better (OSX users have to use the developer
version 0.10.1 or better) of the Nim
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.
On Unix operating systems Nimble can be compiled and installed with two simple commands. After successfully grabbing the latest Nim compiler simply execute the following commands to clone nimble, compile it and then install it.
git clone https://github.com/nim-lang/nimble.git
cd nimble
nim 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
.
You can install via a pre-built installation archive which is available on the releases page or from source.
Download the latest release archive from the
releases page. These archives
will have a filename of the form nimble-x_win32
where x
is the
current version.
Once you download that archive unzip it and execute the install.bat
file.
One important thing to note is that this installation requires you have
the Nim compiler in your PATH. Once the installation completes you should
add C:\Users\YourName\.nimble\bin
to your PATH.
On Windows installing Nimble from source is slightly more complex:
git clone https://github.com/nim-lang/nimble.git
cd nimble
nim 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 and
during installation Nimble will recompile itself.
Once the installation completes you should
add C:\Users\YourName\.nimble\bin
to your PATH.
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 $nimbleDir/bin
. Most Nimble
packages will provide .nim
files and some documentation. The Nim
compiler is aware of Nimble and will automatically find the modules so you can
import modulename
and have that working without additional setup.
However, some Nimble packages can provide additional tools or commands. If you
don't add their location ($nimbleDir/bin
) to your $PATH
they will not
work properly and you won't be able to run them.
Once you have Nimble installed on your system you can run the nimble
command
to obtain a list of available commands.
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.
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.
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
The build
command is mostly used by developers who want to test building
their .nimble
package. This command will build the package in debug mode,
without installing anything. The install
command will build the package
in release mode instead.
If you are a developer willing to produce new Nimble packages please read the developers.markdown file for detailed information.
The c
(or compile
, js
, cc
, cpp
) command can be used by
developers to compile individual modules inside their package. All options
passed to Nimble will also be passed to the Nim compiler during compilation.
Nimble will use the backend specified in the package's .nimble
file if
the command c
or compile
is specified. The more specific js
, cc
,
cpp
can be used to override that.
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.
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: Nim 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.
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
The nimble init
command will start a simple wizard which will create
a quick .nimble
file for your project.
At startup Nimble will attempt to read ~/.config/nimble/nimble.ini
on Linux
(on Windows it will attempt to read
C:\Users\<YourUser>\AppData\Roaming\nimble\nimble.ini
).
The format of this file corresponds to the ini format with some Nim 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/
chcp
- Whether to change the current code page when executing Nim application packages. Iftrue
this will addchcp 65001
to the .cmd stubs generated in~/.nimble/bin/
. Default:true
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
nim-lang/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, i.e. a package
named "foobar" should have a corresponding foobar.nimble
file.
These files specify information about the package including its name, author, license, dependencies and more. Without one Nimble is not able to install a package. A bare minimum .nimble file follows:
[Package]
name = "ProjectName"
version = "0.1.0"
author = "Your Name"
description = "Example .nimble file."
license = "MIT"
[Deps]
Requires: "nim >= 0.10.0"
You may omit the dependencies entirely, but specifying the lowest version of the Nim compiler required is recommended.
Nimble currently supports installation of packages from a local directory, a git repository and a mercurial repository. The .nimble file must be present in the root of the directory or repository being installed.
Library packages are likely the most popular form of Nimble packages. They are meant to be used by other library packages or the ultimate binary packages.
When nimble installs a library it will copy all the files in the package
into $nimbleDir/pkgs/pkgname-ver
. It's up to the package creator to make sure
that the package directory layout is correct, this is so that users of the
package can correctly import the package.
By convention, it is suggested that the layout be as follows. The directory layout is determined by the nature of your package, that is, whether your package exposes only one module or multiple modules.
If your package exposes only a single module, then that module should be
present in the root directory (the directory with the .nimble file) of your git
repository, it is recommended that in this case you name that module whatever
your package's name is. A good example of this is the
jester package which exposes the jester
module. In this case the jester package is imported with import jester
.
If your package exposes multiple modules then the modules should be in a
PackageName
directory. This will allow for a certain measure of isolation
from other packages which expose modules with the same names. In this case
the package's modules will be imported with import PackageName/module
.
You are free to combine the two approaches described.
In regards to modules which you do not wish to be exposed. You should place
them in a PackageName/private
directory. Your modules may then import these
private modules with import PackageName/private/module
. This directory
structure may be enforced in the future.
All files and folders in the directory of where the .nimble file resides will be
copied as-is, you can however skip some directories or files by setting
the SkipDirs
, SkipFiles
or SkipExt
options in your .nimble file.
Directories and files can also be specified on a whitelist basis, if you
specify either of InstallDirs
, InstallFiles
or InstallExt
then
Nimble will only install the files specified.
These are application packages which require building prior to installation.
A package is automatically a binary package as soon as it sets at least one
bin
value, like so:
bin = "main"
In this case when nimble install
is invoked, nimble will build the main.nim
file, copy it into $nimbleDir/pkgs/pkgname-ver/
and subsequently create a
symlink to the binary in $nimbleDir/bin/
. On Windows a stub .bat file is
created instead.
Other files will be copied in the same way as they are for library packages.
Binary packages should not install .nim files so you should include
SkipExt = "nim"
in your .nimble file, unless you intend for your package to
be a binary/library combo which is fine.
Dependencies are automatically installed before building. Before publishing your
package you should ensure that the dependencies you specified are correct.
You can do this by running nimble build
or nimble install
in the directory
of your package.
One thing to note about library and binary package hybrids is that your binary
will most likely share the name of the package. This will mean that you will
not be able to put your .nim files in a pkgname
directory. The current
convention to get around this problem is to append pkg
to the name as is
done for nimble.
Dependencies are specified under the [Deps]
section in a nimble file.
The requires
key field is used to specify them. For example:
[Deps]
Requires: "nim >= 0.10.0, jester > 0.1 & <= 0.5"
Dependency lists support version ranges. These versions may either be a concrete
version like 0.1
, or they may contain any of the less-than (<
),
greater-than (>
), less-than-or-equal-to (<=
) and greater-than-or-equal-to
(>=
). Two version ranges may be combined using the &
operator for example:
> 0.2 & < 1.0
which will install a package with the version greater than 0.2
and less than 1.0.
Specifying a concrete version as a dependency is not a good idea because your package may end up depending on two different versions of the same package. If this happens Nimble will refuse to install the package. Similarly you should not specify an upper-bound as this can lead to a similar issue.
In addition to versions you may also specify git/hg tags, branches and commits.
These have to be concrete however. This is done with the #
character,
for example: jester#head
. Which will make your package depend on the
latest commit of Jester.
The Nim compiler cannot read .nimble files. Its knowledge of Nimble is
limited to the nimblePaths
feature which allows it to use packages installed
in Nimble's package directory when compiling your software. This means that
it cannot resolve dependencies, and it can only use the latest version of a
package when compiling.
When Nimble builds your package it actually executes the Nim compiler. It resolves the dependencies and feeds the path of each package to the compiler so that it knows precisely which version to use.
This means that you can safely compile using the compiler when developing your software, but you should use nimble to build the package before publishing it to ensure that the dependencies you specified are correct.
Versions of cloned packages via git or mercurial are determined through the repository's tags.
When installing a package which needs to be downloaded, after the download is complete and if the package is distributed through a VCS, nimble will check the cloned repository's tags list. If no tags exist, nimble will simply install the HEAD (or tip in mercurial) of the repository. If tags exist, nimble will attempt to look for tags which resemble versions (e.g. v0.1) and will then find the latest version out of the available tags, once it does so it will install the package after checking out the latest version.
You can force the installation of the HEAD of the repository by specifying
#head
after the package name in your dependency list.
Nimble's packages list is stored on github and everyone is encouraged to add their own packages to it! Take a look at nim-lang/packages to learn more.
name
- The name of the package.version
- The current version of this package. This should be incremented after tagging the current version usinggit tag
orhg tag
.author
- The name of the author of this package.description
- A string describing the package.license
- The name of the license in which this package is licensed under.
SkipDirs
- A list of directory names which should be skipped during installation, separated by commas.SkipFiles
- A list of file names which should be skipped during installation, separated by commas.SkipExt
- A list of file extensions which should be skipped during installation, the extensions should be specified without a leading.
and should be separated by commas.InstallDirs
- A list of directories which should exclusively be installed, if this option is specified nothing else will be installed except the dirs listed here, the files listed inInstallFiles
, the files which share the extensions listed inInstallExt
, the .nimble file and the binary (ifbin
is specified). Separated by commas.InstallFiles
- A list of files which should be exclusively installed, this complementsInstallDirs
andInstallExt
. Only the files listed here, directories listed inInstallDirs
, files which share the extension listed inInstallExt
, the .nimble file and the binary (ifbin
is specified) will be installed. Separated by commas.InstallExt
- A list of file extensions which should be exclusively installed, this complementsInstallDirs
andInstallFiles
. Separated by commas.srcDir
- Specifies the directory which contains the .nim source files. Default: The directory in which the .nimble file resides; i.e. root dir of the package.binDir
- Specifies the directory wherenimble build
will output binaries. Default: The directory in which the .nimble file resides; i.e. root dir of the package.bin
- A list of files which should be built separated by commas with no file extension required. This option turns your package into a binary package, nimble will build the files specified and install them appropriately.backend
- Specifies the backend which will be used to build the files listed inbin
. Possible values include:c
,cc
,cpp
,objc
,js
. Default: c
requires
- Specified a list of package names with an optional version range separated by commas. Example:nim >= 0.10.0, jester
; with this value your package will depend onnim
version 0.10.0 or greater and on any version ofjester
.
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 have any questions about the project you can ask me directly on github, ask on the Nim forum, or ask on Freenode in the #nim channel.
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).