Hello folks,

The aim of this post is to make a (mostly) complete and accurate view of the different solutions available to you when you produce code and want to manage your dependencies like a boss, for different languages. We'll see how languages have different approaches to dependency management.

I'll be writing about these 9 languages:

• PHP
• Python
• Rust
• Go
• Javascript
• Elixir
• Nim
• C#
• Ruby

Let's start with an easy one: PHP

Composer

Composer is the de facto standard for dependencies management in PHP. It's very hard today to get anything done in PHP without it. I recommend reading this article from Théo Fidry if you want to know more about the limitations of composer and the workarounds (like using PHARs).

PEAR

pear / pear-core

This is the definitive source of PEAR's core files.

PEAR - The PEAR Installer

What is the PEAR Installer? What is PEAR?

PEAR is the PHP Extension and Application Repository, found at http://pear.php.net.

The PEAR Installer is this software, which contains executable files and PHP code that is used to download and install PEAR code from pear.php.net.

PEAR contains useful software libraries and applications such as MDB2 (database abstraction), HTML_QuickForm (HTML forms management), PhpDocumentor (auto-documentation generator), DB_DataObject (Data Access Abstraction), and many hundreds more. Browse all available packages at http://pear.php.net, the list is constantly growing and updating to reflect improvements in the PHP language.

Warning

Do not run PEAR without installing it - if you downloaded this tarball manually, you MUST install it. Read the instructions in INSTALL prior to use.

Documentation

Documentation for PEAR can be found at http://pear.php.net/manual/. Installation documentation can be found in the INSTALL file included in this tarball.

Tests

Run the…

View on GitHub

This is the old school player. It installs dependencies to the system. Only use it if your distribution is not shipping the extension in a package already. Note that you can use composer to install a PEAR package, see this part of phptherightway for more.

That's it for PHP. I'm pretty sure there are no other PHP dependencies management applications out there, but if I'm wrong please let me know in the comments section.

Second language: Python

Pip

pip is the goto package manager for python, it has its drawbacks but is a very popular tool to install Python dependencies. BTW, you should Stop using sudo pip install. Use pip with moderation (and the --user flag!).

Venv

The official module for managing your project's dependencies inside a virtual environment, thus not polluting the rest of the OS.

Virtualenv

This project started in 2011 and is very useful to isolate dependencies for a project. Part of this project is now venv in the standard python library. So you can think of virtualvenv as a more feature complete venv.

Pipenv

Pipenv started in early 2017 and was very quickly popular. It's my favorite, too. It works very similarly to composer with a lockfile and all the dependencies are installed in a special folder. To run the script in the environment, you need to prepend pipenv run. See my previous post about it. Note that the official Python doc is recommending pipenv for managing dependencies.

Something interesting to note, is that all of the above-mentioned projects are all hosted in the github.com/pypa namespace, the Python Package Authority, a group dedicated to maintaining the python packagers. I think it's nice to have this kind of "authority" for improving the ecosystem in Python.

The third language we'll talk about is: Rust

Cargo

Well, here it's a nobrainer, because (AFAIK) there is only one solution, and it's Cargo.

Cargo is great. Cargo is shit. YMMV. Honestly, it's pretty cool to have one official tool for dependencies management, at least it saves you the time you would have spent choosing one! It installs dependencies per-project but can also be used for system-wide packages. Interestingly, it uses the TOML syntax for the configuration file, whereas other projects chose YAML or JSON.

Let's move on to the fourth language: Go

go get is is the way to install a dependency in Go. But the issue is that it'll be installed system-wide (in $GOPATH). Say hello to conflicts and breaking changes because you can only have one version of a lib…

This led to other approaches like git submodules or project specific $GOPATH and a lot of developers being angry at Go.

However, with Go version 1.11 (released in August 2018) there is now something called modules. Check out the wiki page to know more about Go modules. I believe this will be the future of Go dependencies management, because fuck system-wide dependencies.

What do I see? Is that the fifth language? Yep: Javascript

Aaaaahhh, javascript and the dependencies, what a wonderful world! :)

Npm

curl -qL https://www.npmjs.com/install.sh | sh

npm <command>

Everyone knows npm. You define your dependencies in a package.json and install them in the node_modules folder. Since version 5, there is a package-lock.json allowing you to have reproducible builds.

Yarn

Yarn had reproducible builds well before npm. It also doesn't suffer from the sometimes poor decisions taken by npm's project leaders. It's fast, works well. It's my tool of choice.

Bower

Come on now! We said 2019 in the title! Forget about bower.

I will not talk about Parcel or Webpack as these are bundlers, not package managers.

Note that you can use either yarn or npm with the exact same package.json!

One thing to note about packages in javascript, is that it has become completely crazy, with micro libraries consisting of one line of code more or less, being used by hundred of thousands of other packages. For fun, go into a Javascript project and try this command:

ls node_modules | grep '^is*'

How fun is it to have is-obj, is-object, is-plain-obj, is-plain-object or things like isarray, but also is-arrayish… Do we really need a package is-windows when all it does is:

return process && (process.platform === 'win32' || /^(msys|cygwin)$/.test(process.env.OSTYPE)); ?

And good luck if you want to look at the code of all of these libraries for your project. That lead to the left-pad chaos.

So my advice here is to think hard before installing a javascript dependency, as it might come with hundred of these little library, and one day, one of them will become malicious (see malicious packages on npmjs.com).

You can use Depcheck to try and cleanup a bit your dependencies.

Let's talk about a more exciting language, like: Elixir

Elixir is a bit like Rust when it comes to dependency management: one official tool that gets the job done: Mix (or Hex for Erlang). Nothing more to say here, it works well enough and lets you focus on other things.

Okay so what do we have left? Nim?

Nim is a pretty new and cool language, and the name of the package manager is sooooo cute <3: Nimble. Which reminds me of this guy:

Nothing to see here, just use the one provided and get coding!

The next language is C#

Nuget

This is the standard package manager that comes with Visual Studio. It exists since 2010 and is developed by the .NET foundation. I don't have much more to say about it because it's really windowsy and that's clearly not my platform of choice when it comes to anything vaguely related to computing.

Last but not least: Ruby

Rubygem

$ gem install nokogiri

This is the standard way to get dependencies for a ruby project. It can be seen as pip for ruby, because it installs packages system-wide. You can install them for your user with the --user-install flag (better: add gem: --user-install to ~/.gemrc to always install gems in your home).

So what about managing dependencies per-project you'll ask?

Bundler: a gem to bundle gems

gem install bundler

You get a Gemfile and Gemfile.lock file, and you're sure the project will run everywhere with the same versions of gems.

But there is something interesting about the ruby ecosystem: it exists a lot more projects to switch between different ruby versions (chruby, rbenv, rvm, uru) than to install dependencies.

Conclusion

As you can see, some languages have it all figured out for you (rust, nim), while for others you need to make a choice (python, javascript), and for some you have system-wide and project-wide solutions (python, ruby). I don't quite understand why Go, a "recent" language didn't do a better job at dependency management. But this fits well with the view that "Go was created like we were still in the 70's".

Take home messages

• Install your dependencies per project with a reproducible build (lock down versions of packages) to avoid surprises and to get something portable.

• Try to avoid installing too many dependencies (javascript, I'm looking at you!).

• Don't ship the dependencies with your project but ship the lockfile ;)

That's all folks, please leave a comment if you think I forgot something important or if I got something wrong ;)

Have fun coding!