Qompoter

Dependency manager for Qt / C++

View Qompoter on GitHub

Qompoter is an attempt of dependency manager for Qt / C++, because I am sick of managing each C++ piece of code separately!

The current version is still a work in progress but it is usable for simple and complex projects!

Check the FAQ to understand “Why Qompoter?”, but here is what Qompoter is good for:

  • easily share the required source dependencies of your Qt / C++ project with a team
    • describe them in a “qompoter.json” file
    • let Qompoter search and download them for you into a “vendor” directory
  • share C++ code to the inqlude repository, a development forge (like Github) or any local or remote Qompotist-fs repository
  • ease the repeatability of the build
  • work with several platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac, …)
  • keep it simple

Qompoter is also useful to share library (or binary) dependencies of you Qt / C++ project. However, keep in mind this is not that simple, this requires precompiling these dependencies somewhere for all the required targets (x86, x86_64, ARM, …).

Installation

Requirements

Qompoter requires Bash, Git, sed. Other tools like rsync, curl (or wget) and tar (or zip) may be useful for some advanced cases.

It works on Linux, including Busybox Linux based system like Alpine, and Windows (using Git bash).

It also works on MacOS, but requires additional packages to be installed with Homebrew (https://brew.sh/): brew install gnu-sed && brew install coreutils, then make sure to add these to your path, in order to use GNU sed and GNU date instead of the MacOS version:

PATH=/usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin:$PATH
PATH=/usr/local/opt/gnu-sed/libexec/gnubin:$PATH

It should also work on FreeBSD and more widely on Windows (Cygwin or Mysys command line) because it is Bash based, but I did not test it yet.

Using npm

$ npm install -g qompoter
$ qompoter --version
Qompoter v0.5.1
Dependency manager for C++/Qt by Fylhan

From scratch

Download it from Github and move it to a place accessible in the PATH:

$ wget https://github.com/Fylhan/qompoter/releases/download/v0.5.1/qompoter.sh -O qompoter.sh && sudo mv qompoter.sh /usr/bin/qompoter
$ qompoter --version
Qompoter 0.5.1
Dependency manager for C++/Qt by Fylhan

To enable autocompletion, download the script and source it in your ~/.bashrc file:

wget https://github.com/Fylhan/qompoter/releases/download/v0.5.1/qompoter_bash_completion.sh -O qompoter_bash_completion.sh && sudo mv qompoter_bash_completion.sh /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/qompoter
echo "test [ -f /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/qompoter ]; source /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/qompoter" >> ~/.bashrc

Using Debian package (beta)

A Debian package can be generated using the script available in resources/create-deb-package.sh. Please share feedback!

Getting Started

In your project, create a qompoter.json file:

{
    "name": "george/return-of-the-jedi",
    "description": "Three things remains: faith, hope and love.",
    "keywords": ["Jedi", "Force", "Faith", "Hope", "Love"],
    "authors": [
        {
            "name": "George Lucas",
            "homepage": "https://starwars.com"
        }
    ],
    "require": {
        "young/luke": "v0.2.1-beta",
        "young/leia": "v0.5.*",
        "old/yoda": "dev-master"
    },
    "require-dev": {
        "milenium-falcon/han": "v1.0"
    },
    "repositories": {
        "old/yoda" : "https://github.com"
    }
}

Then, download and install dependencies listed in your qompoter.json using:

qompoter install

For more information about the command line options, use qompoter --help or check the online help.

That’s it! Qompoter has downloaded all required dependencies into the vendor directory and you can now include vendor.pri in the .pro file of your project, and use the dependencies that you required:

CONFIG += luke leia yoda han
include(vendor/vendor.pri)

Let’s start coding!

During development, if you want to change / upgrade the version of an existing package, add or remove packages: update the qompoter.json file accordingly and run again qompoter install.

If you reached a milestone of your project and wanted to provide a backup of your project’s dependencies, run qompoter export to create an archive file of the vendor directory, or qompoter export --repo <path to a directory> to create a Qompotist-fs repository on which you can run qompoter install. You may want to use qompoter inspect before to check you did not modified manually any packages in the vendor directory.

Important change between Qompoter 0.4 and 0.5

The qompoter update has been introduced and is identical to the <0.4 qompoter install action: take the qompoter.json, download dependencies and generate a qompoter.lock file listing the downloaded versions.

The qompoter install action has been modified as follow: take the qompoter.lock and download dependencies. This allows to download the same version used by the last qompoter update without computing again the potential variadic version numbers.

Documentation

Take a look at the roadmap.

License

  • Qompoter is distributed under the LGPL3+ license. Therefore, you can freely use it in any projects, even closed ones. Just keep in mind that if you modify Qompoter, you shall provide these updates as open source. Thanks!
  • Qompoter is using JSON.sh under the MIT and Apache 2 license. Qompoter unit tests are also based on the JSON.sh architecture.

Please feel free to contribute.

If you have any ideas, critics, suggestions or whatever you want to call it, please open an issue. I will be happy to hear from you what you would like to see in this tool. I think about all suggestions, and I try to add those that make sense.