dub package manager

Package and build manager for D applications and libraries.

There is a central package registry located at http://registry.vibed.org. The location will likely change to a dedicated domain at some point.

Introduction

DUB emerged as a more general replacement for vibe.d's package manager. It does not imply a dependecy to vibe.d for packages and was extended to not only directly build projects, but also to generate project files (currently VisualD and Mono-D).

The project's pilosophy is to keep things as simple as possible. All that is needed to make a project a dub package is to write a short package.json file and put the source code into a source subfolder. It can then be registered on the public package registry to be made available for everyone. Any dependencies specified in package.json are automatically downloaded and made available to the project during the build process.

Key features

• Simple package and build description not getting in your way

• Integrated with Git, avoiding maintainance tasks such as incrementing version numbers or uploading new project releases

• Generation of VisualD and Mono-D project/solution files

• Support for DMD, GDC and LDC (common DMD flags are translated automatically)

• Supports development workflows by optionally using local directories as a package source

Future direction

To make things as flexible as they need to be for certain projects, it is planned to gradually add more options to the package file format and eventually to add the possibility to specify an external build tool along with the path of it's output files. The idea is that DUB provides a convenient build management that suffices for 99% of projects, but is also usable as a bare package manager that doesn't get in your way if needed.

Installation

DUB comes precompiled for Windows, Mac OS, Linux and FreeBSD. It needs to have the following dependencies installed (except on Windows):

• libevent 2.0.x
• OpenSSL

The dub executable then just needs to be accessible from PATH and can be invoked from the root folder of any DUB enabled project to build and run it.

If you want to build for yourself, you need to install vibe.d and run vibe build from DUB's main folder and rename the resulting "app" file to "dub".