via-package-manager

vpm - Via Package Manager

Discover and install Via packages powered by via.world

You can configure vpm by using the vpm config command line option (recommended) or by manually editing the ~/.via/.vpmrc file as per the npm config.

Relation to npm

vpm bundles npm with it and spawns npm processes to install Via packages. The major difference is that vpm sets multiple command line arguments to npm to ensure that native modules are built against Chromium's v8 headers instead of node's v8 headers.

The other major difference is that Via packages are installed to ~/.via/packages instead of a local node_modules folder and Via packages are published to and installed from GitHub repositories instead of npmjs.com

Therefore you can think of vpm as a simple npm wrapper that builds on top of the many strengths of npm but is customized and optimized to be used for Via packages.

Installing

vpm is bundled and installed automatically with Via. You can run the Via > Install Shell Commands menu option to install it again if you aren't able to run it from a terminal (macOS only).

Building

• Clone the repository
• 🐧 Install libsecret-1-dev (or the relevant libsecret development dependency) if you are on Linux
• Run npm install; this will install the dependencies with your built-in version of Node/npm, and then rebuild them with the bundled versions.
• Run ./bin/npm run build to compile the CoffeeScript code (or .\bin\npm.cmd run build on Windows)
• Run ./bin/npm test to run the specs (or .\bin\npm.cmd test on Windows)

Why bin/npm / bin\npm.cmd?

vpm includes npm, and spawns it for various processes. It also comes with a bundled version of Node, and this script ensures that npm uses the right version of Node for things like running the tests. If you're using the same version of Node as is listed in BUNDLED_NODE_VERSION, you can skip using this script.

Using

Run vpm help to see all the supported commands and vpm help <command> to learn more about a specific command.

The common commands are vpm install <package_name> to install a new package, vpm featured to see all the featured packages, and vpm publish to publish a package to via.world.

Behind a firewall?

If you are behind a firewall and seeing SSL errors when installing packages you can disable strict SSL by running:

vpm config set strict-ssl false

Using a proxy?

If you are using a HTTP(S) proxy you can configure vpm to use it by running:

vpm config set https-proxy https://9.0.2.1:0

You can run vpm config get https-proxy to verify it has been set correctly.

Viewing configuration

You can also run vpm config list to see all the custom config settings.