gx is a packaging tool built around the distributed, content addressed filesystem ipfs. It aims to be flexible, powerful and simple (after learning the commands, of course).

gx currently requires that users have a running ipfs daemon on their machine. This requirement may be lifted in the future when better infrastructure is set up.

As simple as:

$ go get -u github.com/whyrusleeping/gx

Creating and publishing new generic package:

$ gx init
$ gx publish

This will output a 'package-hash' which is unique to the exact content of your package at the time of publishing. If someone were to download your package and republish it, it would produce the exact same hash.

To add a dependency of another package to your package, simply import it by its hash:

$ gx import QmaDFJvcHAnxpnMwcEh6VStYN4v4PB4S16j4pAuC2KSHVr

This downloads the package specified by the hash into the vendor directory in your workspace. It also adds an entry referencing the package to the local package.json.

Updating packages in gx is simple:

$ gx update mypkg QmbH7fpAV1FgMp6J7GZXUV6rj6Lck5tDix9JJGBSjFPgUd

This looks into your package.json for a dependency named mypkg and replaces its hash reference with the one given.

Note, this will not touch your code at all, so any references to that hash you have in your code will need to be updated. If you have a language tool (e.g. gx-go) installed, and it has a post-update hook, references to the given package should be updated correctly. If not, you may have to run sed over the package to update everything. The bright side of that is that you are very unlikely to have those hashes sitting around for any other reason so a global find-replace should be just fine.

gx supports named packages via user configured repositories. A repository is simply an ipfs object whose links name package hashes. You can add a repository as either an ipns or ipfs path.

Add a new repo

$ gx repo add myrepo /ipns/QmPupmUqXHBxikXxuptYECKaq8tpGNDSetx1Ed44irmew3

List configured repos

$ gx repo list
myrepo       /ipns/QmPupmUqXHBxikXxuptYECKaq8tpGNDSetx1Ed44irmew3

List packages in a given repo

$ gx repo list myrepo
events      QmeJjwRaGJfx7j6LkPLjyPfzcD2UHHkKehDPkmizqSpcHT
smalltree   QmRgTZA6jGi49ipQxorkmC75d3pLe69N6MZBKfQaN6grGY
stump       QmebiJS1saSNEPAfr9AWoExvpfGoEK4QCtdLKCK4z6Qw7U

Import a package from a repo:

$ gx repo import events

gx can support a wide array of use cases by having sane defaults that are extensible based on the scenario you are in. To this end, gx has hooks that get called during certain operations.

These hooks are language specific, and gx will attempt to make calls to a helper binary matching your language to execute the hooks, for example, when writing go, gx calls gx-go hook <hookname> <args> for any given hook.

Currently available hooks are:

• post-import
  • called after a new package is imported and its info written to package.json
  • takes the hash of the newly imported package as an argument
• post-init
  • called after a new package is initialized
  • takes an optional argument of the directory of the newly init'ed package
• pre-publish
  • called during gx publish before the package is bundled up and added to ipfs
  • currently takes no arguments
• post-publish
  • called during gx publish after the package has been added to ipfs
  • takes the hash of the newly published package as an argument
• post-update
  • called during gx update after a dependency has been updated
  • takes the old package ref and the new hash as arguments

The vendor/gx (package) directory contains all of the downloaded dependencies of your package. You do not need to add the contents of the vendor/gx directory to version control, simply running gx install in the root directory of your project will fetch and download the appropriate versions of required packages.

Note: This is not to say that you can't add the vendor/gx directory to version control, by all means do if you want a single git clone or svn co to bring all deps with it!

If you want (like me) to use gx as a package manager for go, its pretty easy. You will need the gx go extensions before starting your project:

$ go get -u github.com/whyrusleeping/gx-go

Once thats installed, use gx like normal to import dependencies. You can import code from the vendor directory using:

import "gx/<hash>/packagename"

for example:

import "gx/QmR5FHS9TpLbL9oYY8ZDR3A7UWcHTBawU1FJ6pu9SvTcPa/cobra"

Then simply set the environment variable GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT to 1 and run go build or go install like you normally would.

See the gx-go repo for more details.

If you want to extend gx to work with any other language or environment, you can implement the relevant hooks in a binary named gx-X where the 'X' is the name of your environment. (See 'hooks' above)