Open Source Mac Dependency Managers

Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP, inspired by node's npm and ruby's bundler. It allows you to declare, manage and install the libraries on which your PHP project depends. Unlike most package managers, Composer manages on a per-project basis. It installs packages or libraries in a directory (e.g. vendor) inside your project and does not install anything globally. However, for convenience it does support a "global" project via the global command. Suppose your project depends on a number of libraries which in turn, depend on other libraries. Composer enables you to declare these libraries, finds out which versions of these packages you require, and installs them. You can then update all of your dependencies conveniently with just one command.

Vcpkg helps you manage C and C++ libraries on Windows, Linux and MacOS. This tool and ecosystem are constantly evolving, and we always appreciate contributions! After you've gotten vcpkg installed and working, you may wish to add tab completion to your shell. With CMake, you will still need to find_package and the like to use the libraries. Check out the CMake section for more information, including on using CMake with an IDE. In classic mode, vcpkg produces an "installed" tree, whose contents are changed by explicit calls to vcpkg install or vcpkg remove. The installed tree is intended for consumption by any number of projects: for example, installing a bunch of libraries and then using those libraries from Visual Studio, without additional configuration. Because the installed tree is not associated with an individual project, it's similar to tools like brew or apt, except that the installed tree is vcpkg-installation-local, rather than global to a system or user.

Npm (originally short for Node Package Manager) is a package manager for the JavaScript programming language. It is the default package manager for the JavaScript runtime environment Node.js. It consists of a command line client, also called npm, and an online database of public and paid-for private packages, called the npm registry.

CocoaPods is a dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C Cocoa projects. It has over 82 thousand libraries and is used in over 3 million apps. CocoaPods can help you scale your projects elegantly. CocoaPods is built with Ruby and is installable with the default Ruby available on macOS. We recommend you use the default ruby. Using the default Ruby install can require you to use sudo when installing gems. Further installation instructions are in the guides. CocoaPods manages library dependencies for your Xcode projects. The dependencies for your projects are specified in a single text file called a Podfile. CocoaPods will resolve dependencies between libraries, fetch the resulting source code, then link it together in an Xcode workspace to build your project. Ultimately the goal is to improve discoverability of, and engagement in, third party open-source libraries by creating a more centralised ecosystem.

einstein is a dependency management tool that aims to simplify and automate software projects dependencies calculation. Software products are commonly composed of multiple projects, and those projects relate to each other at some kind of level. It's important to guarantee that those relationships are based on the projects' versions so one can assure that they can evolve without compromising such relationships. During dependencies calculation, the einstein tool needs to fetch projects' extra information from a central repository. At its current version, einstein is prepared to communicate to any Gitlab instance, through its api, so it assumes that declared dependencies represents projects that are all stored in a single Gitlab instance. In order to establish a successful connection to the Gitlab Api, it's necessary to create the environment variables on the machine where einstein will be executed.

Carthage is intended to be the simplest way to add frameworks to your Cocoa application. Carthage builds your dependencies and provides you with binary frameworks, but you retain full control over your project structure and setup. Carthage does not automatically modify your project files or your build settings. Get Carthage by running brew install carthage or choose another installation method. Create a Cartfile in the same directory where your .xcodeproj or .xcworkspace is. List the desired dependencies in the Cartfile. Once you have Carthage installed, you can begin adding frameworks to your project. Note that Carthage only supports dynamic frameworks, which are only available on iOS 8 or later (or any version of OS X). We encourage using XCFrameworks as of version 0.37.0 (January 2021), and require XCFrameworks when building on an Apple Silicon Mac. Switching from discrete framework bundles to XCFrameworks requires a few changes to your project.