Introduction

When creating a piece of software, chances are, you’re not going to be writing everything from scratch. Even if you were, you would most likely want to modularize your code into reusable packages.

The job of a package manager is to be able to pull in external modules reproducibly and fast. This is made easy by lde. Simply lde add a dependency and they’ll build on run.

Adding a dependency

The easiest way to add a dependency is with the lde add command.

lde add <name>

This will automatically add a field to your lde.json’s dependencies field.

"dependencies": {
	"<name>": { "version": "^0.9.1" }
}

The newest release is resolved at add time and saved as a caret range, so the dependency follows newer compatible releases (minor and patch bumps) instead of freezing on that one version. Pass an explicit version (lde add <name>@0.9.1, saved as ^0.9.1) or write a range of your own (0.9, >=1.2 <2) to decide how far it may float.

By default, this will look for packages in the lde registry.

Git Dependencies

To add a dependency from a git repository, do:

lde add <name> --git <repo>

This supports nested packages, so if your git repository contains multiple lde packages, it will search for the specific package with the name <name> for monorepo support.

Shorthands

Some shorthands are provided for common git hosts:

• gh:/github: (GitHub)
• gitlab: (GitLab)
• codeberg: (Codeberg)

Here’s some example usage:

lde add gh:bycruz/hood
lde add gitlab:bycruz/hood
lde add codeberg:bycruz/hood

These also support the monorepo form via this syntax:

lde add gh:name@bycruz/hood
lde add gitlab:name@bycruz/hood
lde add codeberg:name@bycruz/hood

Dev Dependencies

Sometimes dependencies are only needed for development, in the case of running tests, type checking, etc.

You can add dev dependencies by writing it to your devDependencies field instead of dependencies, or passing --dev to lde add.

lde add <name> --dev

Removing a dependency

Simply remove the entry from your lde.json, or use lde remove <name>.

Installing dependencies

This should be done for you automatically whenever you lde run or lde ./file.lua.

But, in the case of simply packaging lua for an external runtime (like Love2D, Neovim, etc.), the lde sync command is provided.

Reproduction

On first install, dependencies will be written to a lde.lock file with commit information to keep track of the exact version installed, which is useful for floating dependencies, like git dependencies.

You’ll want to commit this file to your repo if you’re writing an application, libraries should gitignore it as it will not be used.

lde sync
lde sync --locked      # install from the lockfile only
lde sync --production  # skip dev dependencies

Production Installs

You can use lde sync --production to install only production dependencies, skipping dev dependencies.

The same flag exists on lde install for when you want to install the project’s dependencies without dev dependencies:

lde install --production