ALR

ALIRE: Ada LIbrary REpository.

A catalog of ready-to-use Ada libraries plus a command-line tool (alr) to obtain, build, and incorporate them into your own projects. It aims to fulfill a similar role to Rust's cargo or OCaml's opam.

Caveat emptor

Documentation at this time is a work in progress. Expect further efforts in this direction until this warning is removed.

TL;DR

Available for Debian stable / Ubuntu >=17.10 / macOS / Windows

The latest release is version 0.7, which is also the first public beta intended for general testing and feedback gathering towards the 1.0 release. See the Getting Started guide for binary downloads.

If, instead, you want to test the latest development version, see [Building from sources](#building-from source).

Installation and First Steps

See the Getting Started guide.

Building from sources

The build process of alr is straighforward and depends only on a recent GNAT Ada 2012 compiler. All dependencies are included as submodules. A project file (alr_env.gpr) is provided to drive the build with all necessary configuration (see the macOS extra step below, though).

Follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository: git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/alire-project/alire.git
2. Enter the cloned repository folder.
3. Only on macOS: define the environment variable OS=macOS
4. Build the executable: gprbuild -j0 -P alr_env

The binary will be found at bin/alr. You can run alr version to see version and diagnostics information.

Design principles

alr is tailored to userspace, in a similar way to Python's virtualenv. A project or workspace will contain all its dependencies.

Some crates benefit from using platform packages. In this case the user will be asked to authorize a sudo installation through the platform package manager.

Properties and dependencies of projects are managed through a TOML file. This file exists locally for working copies of projects, and the Alire community index stores the files corresponding to its projects.

The complete build environment is set up by setting the GPR_PROJECT_PATH environment variable before running gprbuild, thus freeing the user from concerns about installation paths. The user simply adds the used projects to its own project GPR file with their simple name.

Supported platforms

Alire requires a recent Ada 2012 compiler. In practice, this currently means GNAT Community or GNAT FSF 7.2 onward. The continuous integration checks are run against Debian stable, Ubuntu LTS, Windows and MacOS.

Note that platform-provided Ada libraries (such as Debian's GtkAda) require the use of the platform Ada compiler. Otherwise these libraries will be unavailable, potentially making dependent crates unavailable too.