The Swift Package Manager is a tool for managing distribution of source code, aimed at making it easy to share your code and reuse others’ code. The tool directly addresses the challenges of compiling and linking Swift packages, managing dependencies, versioning, and supporting flexible distribution and collaboration models.
We’ve designed the system to make it easy to share packages on services like GitHub, but packages are also great for private personal development, sharing code within a team, or at any other granularity.
To learn about the policies and best practices that govern contributions to the Swift project, please read the Contributor Guide.
If you are interested in contributing, please read the Community Proposal, which provides some context for decisions made in the current implementation and offers direction for the development of future features.
Tests are an important part of the development and evolution of this project, and new contributions are expected to include tests for any functionality change. To run the tests, pass the test verb to the bootstrap script:
./Utilities/bootstrap test
Long-term, we intend for testing to be an integral part of the Package Manager itself and to not require custom support.
The Swift package manager uses llbuild as the underlying build system for compiling source files. It is also open source and part of the Swift project.
The package manager’s system requirements are the same as those for Swift with the caveat that the package manager requires Git at runtime as well as build-time.
The Swift Package Manager is included in Xcode 8.0 and all subsequent release.
The package manager is also available for other platforms as part of all Snapshots available at swift.org, including snapshots for the latest versions built from master. For installation instructions for downloaded snapshots, please see the Getting Started section of swift.org.
You can verify your installation by typing swift package --version in a terminal:
$ swift package --version
Apple Swift Package Manager - ...On macOS /usr/bin/swift is just a stub that forwards invocations to the active
toolchain. Thus when you call swift build it will use the swift defined by
your TOOLCHAINS environment variable. This can be used to easily switch
between the default tools, and a development snapshot:
$ xcrun --find swift
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin/swift
$ swift --version
Apple Swift version 3.0
$ export TOOLCHAINS=swift
$ xcrun --find swift
/Library/Developer/Toolchains/swift-latest.xctoolchain/usr/bin/swift
$ swift --version
Swift version 3.0-devTo use a specific toolchain you can set TOOLCHAINS to the CFBundleIdentifier in an .xctoolchain’s Info.plist.
The Package Manager project is itself a Swift Package and can be used to build itself. If you are interested in contributing to the package manager, however, we recommend one of the three following options:
-
Using the Swift project
build-script:swift/utils/build-script --swiftpm --llbuild -
Independently with the bootstrap script:
-
Locate its
usr/bindirectory -
Run the bootstrap script:
swiftpm/Utilities/bootstrap --swiftc path/to/snapshot/usr/bin/swiftc --sbt path/to/snapshot/usr/bin/swift-build-toolswiftcandswift-build-toolare both executables provided as part of Swift downloadable snapshots, they are not built from the sources in this repository. -
Using a Swift snapshot, it is possible to use the package manager's support for generating an Xcode project. This project can then be used with the snapshot to develop within Xcode.
swift package generate-xcodeproj
Note that either of the latter two options may not be compatible with the master branch when Swift language changes have caused it to move ahead of the latest available snapshot.
The SWIFT_EXEC environment variable specifies the swiftc executable path used by swift package. If it is not set, the package manager will try to locate it:
- In
swift-package's parent directory. - On macOS, by calling
xcrun --find swiftc. - By searching the PATH.
For extensive documentation on using Swift Package Manager, creating packages, and more, see Documentation.
For additional documentation on developing the Swift Package Manager itself, see Documentation/Internals.
If you have any trouble with the package manager, help is available. We recommend:
- The swift-users mailing list
- Our bug tracker
If you’re not comfortable sharing your question with the list, contact details for the code owners can be found in CODE_OWNERS.txt; however, the mailing list is usually the best place to go for help.
Copyright 2015 - 2016 Apple Inc. and the Swift project authors. Licensed under Apache License v2.0 with Runtime Library Exception.
See https://swift.org/LICENSE.txt for license information.
See https://swift.org/CONTRIBUTORS.txt for Swift project authors.