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

The module system defines the following archive types:

• module archives contain the compiled code and are packaged in a .car file using the ZIP file format.
• source archives contain the source code and are packaged in a .src file using the ZIP file format.
• documentation archives contain the HTML-format API documentation in a module-doc folder.

Finally, legacy Java archives contain compiled Java 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, but not both).

A legacy archive needs to follow the same naming rules and folder structure as defined for .car archives (see below). Furthermore, if the legacy archive has dependencies on other modules they must be specified using a modules.xml or module.properties file.

Repository structure

Ceylon module repositories are organized according to the following structure, for a module com.foo.bar with versions 0.1 and 1.0 as an 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

The Ceylon tools support the following repository types:

• File system repositories
• HTTP repositories (read-only)
• WebDAV repositories (for reading and publishing)
• Maven repositories
• The npm repository
• Flat repositories — when integrating Ceylon in a foreign module runtime programmatically

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 and support command line arguments to add references to your own. All of that is explained in detail on the section on dealing with repositories on the command line.

If you want to know more about how the Ceylon configuration file can be used to change the default behavior of the tools when looking up modules in repositories you can read the section on tool configuration.

Legacy repositories

Ceylon also integrates with other legacy repositories such as Maven.

Dependency overrides

You can override dependencies for Maven or Ceylon modules.