The Package Manager for the Swift Programming Language
Swift Package Manager Project
The Swift Package Manager is a tool for managing distribution of source code, aimed at making it easy to share your code and reuse others’ code. The tool directly addresses the challenges of compiling and linking Swift packages, managing dependencies, versioning, and supporting flexible distribution and collaboration models.
We’ve designed the system to make it easy to share packages on services like GitHub, but packages are also great for private personal development, sharing code within a team, or at any other granularity.
Swift Package Manager includes a build system that can build for macOS and Linux. Starting with Xcode 11, Xcode integrates with libSwiftPM to provide support for iOS, watchOS, and tvOS platforms.
The SourceKit-LSP project leverages libSwiftPM and provides Language Server Protocol implementation for editors that support LSP.
Table of Contents
Getting Started
Please use this guide for learning package manager basics.
Documentation
For Quick Help use the swift package --help command.
For extensive documentation on using Swift Package Manager, creating packages, and more, see Documentation.
For additional documentation on developing the Swift Package Manager itself, see Documentation/Contributing.
For detailed documentation on the package manifest API, see PackageDescription API.
For release notes with information about changes between versions, see Release Notes.
System Requirements
The package manager’s system requirements are the same as those for Swift with the caveat that the package manager requires Git at runtime as well as build-time.
Installation
The Swift Package Manager is included in Xcode 8.0 and all subsequent releases.
The package manager is also available for other platforms as part of all Snapshots available at swift.org, including snapshots for the latest versions built from master. For installation instructions for downloaded snapshots, please see the Getting Started section of swift.org.
You can verify your installation by typing swift package --version in a terminal:
$ swift package --version
Apple Swift Package Manager - ...
Managing Swift Environments
On macOS /usr/bin/swift is just a stub that forwards invocations to the active toolchain. Thus when you call swift build it will use the swift defined by your TOOLCHAINS environment variable. This can be used to easily switch between the default tools, and a development snapshot:
$ xcrun --find swift
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin/swift
$ swift --version
Apple Swift version 3.0
$ export TOOLCHAINS=swift
$ xcrun --find swift
/Library/Developer/Toolchains/swift-latest.xctoolchain/usr/bin/swift
$ swift --version
Swift version 3.0-dev
To use a specific toolchain you can set TOOLCHAINS to the CFBundleIdentifier in an .xctoolchain’s Info.plist.
Choosing a Swift Version
The SWIFT_EXEC environment variable specifies the swiftc executable path used by swift package. If it is not set, the package manager will try to locate it:
- In
swift-package‘s parent directory. - On macOS, by calling
xcrun --find swiftc. - By searching the PATH.
Support
If you have any trouble with the package manager, help is available. We recommend:
- The Swift Forums
- Our bug tracker
When adding a bug to the tracker you should follow the bug reporting guidelines, they can be found in Resources.md.
If you’re not comfortable sharing your question with the list, contact details for the code owners can be found in CODEOWNERS; however, the mailing list is usually the best place to go for help.
Contributions
There are several ways to contribute to Swift Package Manager. To learn about the policies, best practices that govern contributions to the Swift project and instructions for setting up the development environment please read the Contributor Guide.
The Swift package manager uses llbuild as the underlying build system for compiling source files. It is also open source and part of the Swift project.
License
Copyright 2015 – 2020 Apple Inc. and the Swift project authors. Licensed under Apache License v2.0 with Runtime Library Exception.
See https://swift.org/LICENSE.txt for license information.
See https://swift.org/CONTRIBUTORS.txt for Swift project authors.