Introducing DPM – a Package Manager for Delphi
Back in Feb 2019, I blogged about the need for a Package Manager for Delphi. The blog post garnered lots of mostly useful feedback and encouragement, but until recently I could never find a solid block of time to work on it. Over the last few weeks I've been working hard to get it to an mvp stage.
DPM is an open source package/library manager for Delphi XE2 or later. It is heavily influenced by Nuget, so the cli, docs etc will seem very familiar to nuget users. Delphi’s development environment is quite different from .net, and has different challenges to overcome, so whilst I drew heavily on nuget, DPM is not identical to nuget. I also took a close look at many other package managers for other development eco systems.
What is a Package Manager
A package manager provides a standard for developers to share and consume code. Authors create packages that other developers can consume. The package manager provides a simple way to automate the installation, upgrading or removal of packages. This streamlines the development process, allowing developers to get up and running on a project quickly, without needing to understand the (usually adhoc) way the project or organization has structured their third party libraries. This also translates into simpler build/CI processes, with less ‘compiles on my machine’ style issues.
Who and Why
DPM’s initial developer is Vincent Parrett (author of DUnitX, FinalBuilder, Continua CI etc). Why is discussed in this blog post.
DPM Status
DPM is still in development, so not all functionality is ready yet. At this time, it's at the stage where we I would encourage library authors to take a look and play with it and provide feedback (and perhaps get involved in the development). It's very much at a minimum viable product stage. Potential users are of course welcome to look at it and provide feedback, it's just that, well, there are no packages for it yet (there's some test packages in the repo, and I'll be creating ones for my open source libraries). .
What works
- Creating packages
- Pushing packages to a package source.
- Installing packages, including dependencies
- Restoring packages, including dependencies.
How do I use it
The documentation is at http://docs.delphipm.org
See the getting started guide.
The command line documentation can be found here.
The Source is on GitHub https://github.com/DelphiPackageManager/DPM
Is DPM integrated into the Delphi IDE
Not yet but it is planned. If you are a wiz with the open tools api and want to contribute then let us know.
Is there a central package source
Not yet but it is planned. At the moment, only local folder based sources are supported. The client code architecture has a provision for http based sources in the future, however right now we are focused on nailing down the package format, dependency resolution, installation, updating packages etc.
Is my old version of delphi supported
Maybe, see here for supported compiler versions. All target platforms for supported compiler versions are supported.
What about C++ Builder or FPC
Does it support design time components
Not yet, but that is being worked on.
How does it work
See this page