Project Package Manager

This is not a replacement of language/platform dependent package managers (like Python pip or node.js npm), it's destined for managing general project dependencies, especially binaries, and setting a "virtual-like" environment.

currently, there is no standard repository which holds packages, it's the role of a project member to create a packages registry and add meta information of required binaries (creating Packages).

PPM offers also the possiblity of using a repository server (which contains binaries), useful in case you want to download archives and serve them from that repository.

download and install ppm using:
sudo pip install ppm

set registry server:
pip set registry-server http://your-registry-url:port

set repository server(optional):
pip set repository-server http://your-repository-url:port

sync is the main ppm command, it is used to synchronize your current dependencies with required project dependencies, required project dependencies can be specified either locally in a ppmdependencies.json file, or in the registry server(you can set current project using ppm set project sampleproject).

To run the synchronization operation type:
ppm sync

PPM offers the possibility of downloading tarballs without installing them, using the command ppm download.
Some examples (type ppm download -h for more details):
ppm download python@2.7.1 --directory pythondep # download python version 2.7.1 to pythondep directory
ppm download nodejs@latest python@2.7.1 # download nodejs latest version and python 2.7.1 to current directory

the easiest way to setup a registry server is to use the existing config in the registry directory and load it to a couchdb database using couchapp.

a package have the following JSON structure:

{
   "_id": "nodejs",
   "description": "Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications",
   "directoryname": "node",
   "env": [
       "export NODEJS_HOME=\"${HOME}\"",
       "export PATH=\"${NODEJS_HOME}:$PATH\""
   ],
   "versions": {
       "0.10.25": {
           "url": "http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.25/node-v0.10.25.tar.gz"
       },
       "0.10.10": {
       	   "url": "http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.10/node-v0.10.10.tar.gz"
	   }
   }
}

####notes:

_id the identifier of package (requesting packages/package._id returns the above json data).

env is a bash script that ppm use to construct the environment shell script (${HOME} refer to the home directory of package).

a project have the following JSON structure:

{
   "_id": "ppmdemo",
   "description": "a ppm demo",
   "devdependencies": {
       "nodejs": "0.10.25",
       "phantomjs": "1.9.6",
   }
}

clone the repository directory, open config.js and configure it to match your needs. Than type in the command line:

npm install
node main.js