Curry Package Manager
Overview
The Curry Package Manager (CPM) is a tool to distribute and install Curry libraries and applications and manage version dependencies between them. These libraries are organized in packages. There is a central index of all these packages which can easily be downloaded by CPM. The individual packages are currently not stored in a central server but their source can be anywhere. CPM organizes the automatic access to appropriate versions of these packages so that a user does not need to know about these details.
CPM also supports semantic versioning, i.e., it is able to check whether a new minor version of a package is consistent (w.r.t. its API and behavior) with a previous version of the same package.
Available Packages
There are more than 130 packages available (including more than 600 modules). There is a table of all packages with more detailed information (e.g., API documentation). These packages can immediately be downloaded or installed when CPM is installed (see below).
Installing the Curry Package Manager
CPM is already part of recent distributions of the Curry systems PAKCS (Version 1.15.0 or higher), KiCS2 (Version 0.6.0 or higher), and Curry2Go. If you have some older version of PAKCS or KiCS2, you can also install CPM from its public repository. The installation requires that one of the Curry systems PAKCS or KiCS2 is installed and the executables curry and git are in your path (if curry is not in your path, you can also specify the root location of your Curry system by modifying the definition of CURRYROOT in the Makefile before executing make in step 3). Then perform the following steps to install CPM:
If this was successful, the binary cypm has been generated in the directory ~/.cpm/bin. This is also the directory where CPM installs binaries of applications distributed as packages. For convenient use, you should add the directory ~/.cpm/bin to your path. Alternatively, you can also put the binary ~/.cpm/bin/cypm somewhere in your path or create a symbolic link from some path directory to this binary.
Quick Start
If you installed CPM so the binary cypm is in your path, you can clone a copy of the central package index repository by
Afterwards, you can show a short list of all packages in this index by
The command
can be used to show more information about a package.
In order to use a package in your Curry program which you intend to develop, you have to start a new project. Note that your project can also contribute to the Curry packages. Therefore, to initialize it and use other packages, you need a package description file in some project directory. All this can be created by the command cypm new:
This command creates a new project directory myproject containing an initial package description file package.json and a subdirectory src (together with other template files). Change into the new project directory:
If you need some other packages for your project, add them as a dependency in package.json. Then run
to install all dependencies of the current package. Afterwards, start your interactive Curry environment by
and you will be able to load the modules of the current package as well as all dependent packages. In particular, the source directory src is added to your path so that you can directly load any program you have stored in this directory. For instance, if the module Main.curry is stored in the directory src, you can load it into your Curry system (e.g., KiCS2 or PAKCS) by
Manual and Further Documentation
For further information, look into the manual of CPM
A detailed description about CPM and its implementation can be found in the following thesis:
A Package Manager for Curry (Jonas Oberschweiber, CAU Kiel, September 2016)
Uploading and Publishing Packages
New Curry packages can be uploaded and published with Masala, a web-based system to store Curry packages. Packages published via Masala can be used or installed by CPM as sketched above.