Thursday, June 07, 2012

volo 0.2.0 released

volo 0.2.0 has been released. volo is a front end JavaScript package manager, which uses github as the source repository. It can install whole project templates, and it understands volofiles for doing project-specific task automation.

The 0.2.0 release is significant in a few ways:

1) It is now only delivered via npm. So to install it:

    npm install -g volo

2) the format of volofiles have changed. The old format will still work in this release, but to get the new, shorter "shell string" support or for reusing volo commands that can be installed via npm, you will need to convert your volofile to the new format. Some details in the conversion ticket, but see the "Creating a volofile" and "Creating a volo command" pages for more information.

3) "volo add" now recursively adds dependencies. It does not do fancy conflict resolution -- if a dependency with the same name is already installed in that location, then that existing dependency is used.

Recursive dependency installation only works if your package.json has a volo.dependencies section (or there is a shim for the project you want to use in the shims repo). The backbone library has a shim entry, so you can try it out by doing:

    volo add backbone

It is a big release, but there is more to do, particularly on console feedback and formatting. At least now the code structure is set better for the future.

1 comment:

Grancalavera said...

Great! I'm a big fan of volo already, and the fact that now it's delivered using npm makes it only better.