ankit.im

Swift Package Manager Super Updates

Mar 11, 2016
2 minute read

There has been high activity on Swift Package Manager recently starting with Kostiantyn Koval and me receiving commit access \o/. Here is a summary of changes which are worth looking at and will affect you if you’re developing packages with swiftpm.

  • Max Howell ported swiftpm to swift 3 api guidelines.

  • Max Howell added Xcode project file generation into swiftpm, that means you can use Xcode for your swift packages (on OSX).

    Just run this command to generate the Xcode project file for the package.

    $ swift build --generate-xcodeproj
            or
$ swift build -X

    This will generate the Xcode project in root directory of the package. If you prefer the file to be somewhere else Honza Dvorsky raised a PR to generate it in a custom location.

  • I started a PR adding basic support of building C language based on Daniel Dunbar’s proposal.

  • Brian Croom updated the tests in swiftpm since now you don’t have to conform to XCTestCaseProvider for XCTestCase subclasses on linux and instead allTests becomes a static computed property which you pass as param to testCase method in XCTMain. Something like this :

extension MyAwesomeTests {
    static var allTests: [(String, MyAwesomeTests -> () throws -> Void)] {
        return [
            ("testAnAwesomeThingy", testAnAwesomeThingy),
        ]
    }
}

then in LinuxMain.swift :

XCTMain([testCase(MyAwesomeTests.allTests)])

  • I refactored the init mode of swiftpm which can now generate both library and executable packages default being executable package.

      $ swift build --init # same as `swift build --init executable`
  $ swift build --init library

  • I fixed the issue where exclude in Package.swift was not working for folders inside tests directory. Now you can exclude tests or any of the subfolders.

import PackageDescription
let package = Package(
    name: "FooPackage",
    exclude: ["Tests/Fixtures"]
)

  • I added better error handling in swift test which will now suggest to run swift build if someone forgets it before running swift test. Also if there is no test module then swift test now shows a nice one liner error.

  • I improved swift test by adding -h/--help and eliminating the need of adding -XCTest to pass arguments to it.

Internal swiftpm changes

  • Max Howell raised a PR which would give bootstrap script powers to parse swiftpm’s Package.swift so the targets don’t need to be duplicated inside the script 😍

  • I changed the PackageDescription module such that it would read Package.swift and write the TOML represention to a file if a fd is passed to it instead of dumping it on stdout.

  • I refactored the Build module and created models for llbuild tools using protocols and protocol extension instead of subclassing which worked out great.