odb: a simple package installer for ocaml
Odb aims to be an 80% solution for automated ocaml package installation.
Packages will be installed by default to ~/.odb/lib, so add this
entry to your /etc/findlib.conf (or /etc/ocamlfind.conf) path or set the environment
variable OCAMLPATH=~/.odb/lib.
The latest version can be downloaded directly from github with the following command:
curl -O https://raw.github.com/thelema/odb/master/odb.ml
Using odb is very easy. To print a list of available packages, do:
ocaml odb.ml
Once you've chosen some packages, the following command will install them (and their dependencies):
ocaml odb.ml <packagenames>
If you install a package that uses C stub libraries, you will need to
add $HOME/.odb/lib/stublibs to your ocaml/ld.conf file. The
following command does this:
echo $HOME/.odb/lib/stublibs | sudo tee -a `ocamlc -where`/ld.conf
If you don't have write access to your ld.conf file, you can instead
set the environment variable:
export CAML_LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/.odb/lib/stublibs
Odb supports installing packages uploaded to Oasis-DB. These packages are grouped into three "repositories", Stable, Testing and Unstable. The list of packages and versions of each are shown on the Oasis-DB website here: http://oasis.ocamlcore.org/dev/odb/
The latest version of any package on Oasis-DB is available from the
Unstable Repository. No checking is done on these packages by the
repository maintainers, so use at your own risk. Use --unstable to
enable use of this repository.
After a package is verified as at least minimally working by an
Oasis-DB admin, it is upgraded to the Testing repository. This
repository is where pckages go for testing. Use --testing to use
the testing repository.
The default repository is the Stable repository, where packages have
been better verified to work with each other. These packages should
be free of version conflicts, and should all work together. To
explicitly use the stable repository, use --stable, although this is
the default if no other repository is selected.
It is possible to override the use of Oasis-DB and provide your own
server with package metadata by setting the ODB_PACKAGE_ROOT
environment variable.
Odb also supports package metadata from a local packages file.To
inform odb about a package that exists in a local directory, put a
line like one of the following lines into your ~/.odb/packages file:
batteries dir=/home/thelema/batteries
For a package that's available as a tarball from a http source,
foo tarball=http://www.ocamlforge.org/directory/to/foo-ver.tgz
These packages will override any packages of the same name avaiable at
oasis-db. Further documentation of the file format is given in the
example packages file in the odb source tree.