cpm

Crystal Package Manager — a tiny wrapper around shards that saves you from hunting URLs.

Why I Built This

I got tired of this workflow:

1. Want to add kemal to my project
2. Open browser
3. Search "kemal crystal shard"
4. Click GitHub
5. Copy the URL
6. Paste into shard.yml
7. Run shards install

That's 7 steps for something that should be 1.

cpm fixes this:

cpm add kemal   # Done.

No browser. No copy-paste. No remembering URLs.

shards is great at installing dependencies. But it doesn't help you find them. cpm fills that gap and gets out of the way.

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Install

curl -fsSl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/slick-lab/cpm/main/install.sh | sudo bash

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Usage

# Initialize a project
cpm init
cpm init --cache    # also creates ~/.cpm/cache.txt

# Search for packages
cpm search kemal
cpm search kemal --auto   # pick top result automatically

# Add a dependency
cpm add kemal

# Remove a dependency
cpm remove kemal

# Then use shards as normal
shards install
shards prune
shards update

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How it works

cpm doesn't replace shards. It just makes the shard.yml part easier:

• cpm search queries GitHub for Crystal shards
• cpm add checks your cache, writes to shard.yml
• shards handles the actual downloading and version resolution

We keep a simple ~/.cpm/cache.txt:

kemal	https://github.com/kemalcr/kemal
pg	https://github.com/will/crystal-pg

No JSON. No metadata. Just names and URLs.

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Why not just use shards?

shards is perfect for what it does: resolving versions and installing dependencies.

But shards assumes you already know:

• The exact package name
• The GitHub URL
• Whether it's maintained

cpm helps with discovery. Then shards takes over.

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License

MIT