packin

packin replaces npm install. It is way faster, way simpler, and it uses symlinks so you can edit local modules without having to reinstall them all the time. Presumably then npm stands for No-good Phucking Mess.

Installation

1. Install Julia
2. Install Kip.jl
3. echo '@require "github.com/jkroso/Jest.jl"' >> ~/.juliarc.jl
4. git clone https://github.com/jkroso/packin && make -C packin install

Then to update it you just need to run cd ./packin && git pull origin master

Usage

packin is designed as a drop in replacement for npm install. It takes no arguments and has no options.

I did a quick benchmark comparing the two on a project. Both times are with a "warm" cache. packin took 23 seconds and npm install took 1m 27s. And I could shave a good 10 seconds off packin just by precompiling the script. Some extra caching and improving the HTTP library could probably gain a few seconds too.

So packin is way faster but there are already alternatives that are pretty fast. The reason I wrote it though was to make working with local packages easier. So if you don't know the syntax for that take a look at this

Overwriting dependecies

If you have a dependency which depends on a buggy or in development package you can overwrite this package by adding a .packinrc.jl file to your project which looks like this:

spec_cache = Dict{Pair,Any}(
  ("mana" => "jkroso/mana") => "/Users/jkroso/projects/mana"
  ("babel-runtime" => "6") => "http://registry.npmjs.org/babel-runtime/-/babel-runtime-6.1.3.tgz"
)

Where the keys of spec_cache are key => value pairs like you would find in a package.json file and the values are the URI to the local folder or remote tarbal/git-repo