Note: information on this page refers to Ceylon 1.0, not to the current release.

Module repositories

Ceylon supports modules natively. Ceylon Modules contain the following:

• A module descriptor, which contains:
  • A unique name and version
  • Meta-data such as author, license, documentation
  • A list of module dependencies
• A list of packages
• Optionally, a source archive
• Optionally, an API documentation archive

Ceylon modules are published in Ceylon repositories, which are then used by Ceylon tools to consume and produce modules natively.

Archive types

Ceylon module archives contain the compiled code and are packaged in a .car file using the ZIP file format.

Ceylon source archives contain the source code and are packaged in a .src file using the ZIP file format.

Ceylon API documentation archives contain the API documentation in a module-doc folder, which holds HTML documentation.

Legacy Java archives contain the compiled code and are packaged in a .jar file using the ZIP file format just as they are for Java. They are used instead of the corresponding .car archive (you can have on or the other, not both). A legacy archive needs to follow the same naming rules and folder structure as defined for .car archives (see below). Also if the legacy archive has dependencies on other modules they can be defined using a modules.xml or module.properties file, see here for more information.

Repository structure

Ceylon module repositories are organised using the following structure (using a module com.foo.bar of versions 0.1 and 1.0 as example):

root/
    com/
        foo/
            bar/
                1.0/
                    com.foo.bar-1.0.car      -- Ceylon module archive
                    com.foo.bar-1.0.car.sha1 -- Checksum file
                    com.foo.bar-1.0.src      -- Ceylon source archive
                    com.foo.bar-1.0.src.sha1 -- Checksum file
                    module-doc/              -- API documentation 
                        index.html           -- Index page
                        [...]                -- API documentation files
    com/
        foo/
            bar/
                0.1/
                    com.foo.bar-0.1.jar      -- Java legacy archive
                    module.properties        -- Dependencies for legacy archive

Supported repository types

At the moment, the Ceylon tools are able to use the following repository types:

• File system repository
• HTTP repository (for reading)
• WebDAV repository (for reading and publishing). You can specify the user name and password to use for WebDAV publishing in the tools

Standard repositories

The Ceylon tools use a number of standard repositories:

• The distribution repository, which is located in your distribution at $CEYLON_HOME/repo. It contains the modules required by the Ceylon tools: ceylon.language, the tools, the ant tasks.
• The current repository, which is specified by the user when invoking the Ceylon tools, and defaults to modules in the current directory.
• The home repository, which is located at $HOME/.ceylon/repo and contains a cache of module artifacts downloaded from remote repositories.
• The central repository, which is located at https://modules.ceylon-lang.org/repo and will contain every published Ceylon module.

Normally, when looking for a Ceylon module, the tools will use these standard repositories in the order they are listed above. The exact order of lookup and the way you can change it is described in the section on tool configuration.

Legacy repositories

Ceylon supports Maven repository layouts as well, so you can resolve module dependencies for legacy Java jar archives from legacy Maven repositories.

Right now there are two ways of enabling Maven support, the first is using the special "aether" repository, like this:

ceylon compile --rep aether com.example.foo

This is the simplest way and will most likely be enough for most purposes.

If you have special requirements that need a specific Maven setting.xml you can point to it:

ceylon compile --rep aether:/path/to/special/setting.xml com.example.foo

But there's also another way to enable Maven support that is more limited but that allows you to specify a specific Maven repository right there on the command line, for example to use Maven Central you write:

ceylon compile --rep mvn:http://repo1.maven.org/maven2 com.example.foo

Note: This way of specifying Maven repositories is limited and does not resolve Maven dependencies, so you only get the one jar you defined as a dependency.