RingoJS

Package management

A package is a wrapping of modules, code and other assets. Each package must provide a package descriptor, package.json, which contains various metadata about the package. This information is used by tools to install or update them. Ringo follows the CommmonJS packages specification. The recommended approach to install new packages is ringo-admin install.

Packages and Module Lookup

By default packages reside in the packages folder of an application for application-specific dependencies, or in the {$ringo-home}/packages folder for system-wide packages. It’s best practice not to store any application code into any of these two packages folders. The default Ringo configuration adds both {$ringo-home}/packages (called the system module path) and {$current-working-directory}/packages (called the user module path) to its module lookup. You can provide a custom user module search path with the -m command line option.

For example, if you start an application’s main script inside its directory /home/username/my-app/ with ringo main.js and the main script calls require("foo");, then Ringo will look in the following package folders for the foo module:

  1. /home/username/my-app/packages/foo/
  2. /path/to/ringojs/packages/foo/

If you start the script with ringo -m /my/private/stuff/ main.js, Ringo’s lookup changes to:

  1. /my/private/stuff/foo/
  2. /path/to/ringojs/packages/foo/

To include also the standard user module path, you have to call ringo -m ./packages/;/my/private/stuff/ main.js, Ringo’s lookup changes to:

  1. /home/username/my-app/packages/foo/
  2. /my/private/stuff/foo/
  3. /path/to/ringojs/packages/foo/

ringo-admin install

ringo-admin install is a simple command to download and install any package. The basic mode takes an URL of a zip file containing the package to install as argument.

ringo-admin install http://site.com/foo/bar.zip

There is a convenient shortcut for installing packages from a Github repository that allows you to just specify the Github user and repository name:

ringo-admin install [github-user]/[repository]

This will fetch and install the current zipball of the repository's main branch, e.g. https://github.com/[github-user]/[repository]/zipball/main.

rp - Ringo Package Manager (Deprecated)

An easy way to manage packages and their dependencies has been the Ringo package manager rp. rp can install any package available in its online registry http://packages.ringojs.org. Look in the rp wiki on Github for a more detailed documentation.