Avoiding the automatic installation of Janet dependencies that are only necessary for development.
Development Dependencies in Janet
Janet’s package manager, JPM, can be used to install the dependencies of a Janet project that are specified in project.janet under the :dependencies key. If the dependency itself has dependencies, JPM will install these as part of the installation process. That’s conceptually simple but it means that if you need dependencies for the development of your project (e.g. a testing library like Testament), these will be installed for all consumers of your project. That seems like a waste.
Other dependency managers like Ruby’s Bundler or Node’s NPM avoid this problem by providing a means to identify a dependency as being for development. In my latest Janet library, Argy-Bargy, I tried to see if I could do something similar. Here’s what I came up with:
(declare-project
:name "Argy-Bargy"
:description "A fancy command-line argument parser for Janet"
:author "Michael Camilleri"
:license "MIT"
:url "https://github.com/pyrmont/argy-bargy"
:repo "git+https://github.com/pyrmont/argy-bargy"
:dependencies []
:dev-dependencies ["https://github.com/pyrmont/testament"])
(declare-source
:source ["src/argy-bargy.janet"])
(task "dev-deps" []
(if-let [deps ((dyn :project) :dev-dependencies)]
(each dep deps
(bundle-install dep))
(do
(print "no dependencies found")
(flush))))
This solution has two components.
First, we can add whatever keys we want to the declare-project call so let’s create a key :dev-dependencies and add a tuple of URLs just like we would with :dependencies.
Second, we’ll create a task that we can run to install these dependencies. I’ve called this task dev-deps. The task pulls the tuple out of the project metadata and then basically does the same thing that JPM does when we run jpm deps. Now we can run this task by typing jpm run dev-deps at the command line. ✺