Wand

wand is a dependency manager that uses a wand.json file to replace your deps() in mix.exs. This allows you to add, remove, and upgrade packages easily using the wand cli.

Quickstart

To install, paste into a terminal: mix archive.install hex wand_core --force && mix escript.install hex wand --force

To use wand in a project: wand init

Add a dependency: wand add poison

Remove a dependency: wand remove poison

Upgrade a dependency: wand upgrade poison --latest

help: wand --?

How it works

Wand works by removing your dependencies from mix.exs and storing them instead in wand.json. This is necessary because mix.exs is a code file - it’s regular elixir. This makes programatically updating dependencies hard because of the complex mix.exs files folks can have. Instead, by saving the dependencies in wand.json, wand can easily add, remove, and upgrade your dependencies.

Installing wand

Prerequisites

Wand requires elixir before installing. You also need to have hex installed by running mix local.hex

Installation

To install, we need to add wand_core, wand, and then make sure the binary is on your path.
Adding wand and wand_core is simple. Just open a terminal and paste the following line in:
mix archive.install hex wand_core --force && mix escript.install hex wand --force

Once that is done, then wand is successfully installed on your system to ~/.mix/escripts. You can verify that by running ~/.mix/escripts/wand in the terminal. If successful, it should display the wand help information. It’s a pain to type the full path every time, so it is suggested you add the directory to your path. Edit your .bashrc (or similar config file) to look something like this: export PATH=$HOME/.mix/escripts:$PATH. Then, restart your terminal, and run which wand. If that points to ~/.mix/escripts/wand, then you’re all set!

Verify Installation

You can verify that wand was properly installed by typing wand --version to make sure wand is installed, and wand core --version to make sure that wand_core is installed

Usage

Get started by navigating to an existing elixir project and type wand init. This will generate a wand.json file. You should check this file into your source control. From now on, your dependencies are controlled by wand.json in conjunction with your mix.lock file. Let’s take a quick look at an example wand.json file:

{
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "dependencies": {
    "ex_doc": [">= 0.0.0",{"only":":dev"}],
    "excoveralls": ["~> 0.9.1",{"only":":test"}],
    "junit_formatter": ["~> 2.2",{"only":":test"}],
    "mox": ["~> 0.3.2",{"only":":test"}]
  }
}

The dependencies key should look very similar to your deps() inside of mix.exs. The pattern of each entry is either name: requirement or name: [requirement, {opts}]. The options should look familiar, they exactly match the existing allowed options. It’s possible to edit this by hand, but it’s better to use the wand cli:

CLI commands

add         Add dependencies to your project
core        Manage the related wand_core package
help        Get detailed help
init        Initialize wand for a project
outdated    List packages that are out of date
remove      Remove dependencies from your project
upgrade     Upgrade a dependency in your project
version     Get the version of wand installed on the system
Options
--verbose   Detailed help for every command
--?         Same as --verbose

Detailed help is available by typing wand help [command] or by clicking on the links below:

• Wand.CLI.Commands.Add
• Wand.CLI.Commands.Core
• Wand.CLI.Commands.Help
• Wand.CLI.Commands.Init
• Wand.CLI.Commands.Outdated
• Wand.CLI.Commands.Remove
• Wand.CLI.Commands.Upgrade
• Wand.CLI.Commands.Version

CircleCI and other CI.

You need to have the wand_core archive added to your image before running mix deps.get. The command for CircleCI would be:
- run: mix archive.install hex wand_core --force

Publishing packages

You need to make sure that wand.json is uploaded to hex when publishing packages. This is accomplished by modifying the package key in your mix.exs file as follows:

def project do
  [
    package: [
      files: ["mix.exs", "wand.json", "lib"] # etc add more files as needed
    ]
  ]
end

This will ensure that wand.json is uploaded along with your other files

Local development

1. mix archive.install hex wand_core --force
2. git clone git@github.com:AnilRedshift/wand.git
3. cd wand
4. mix deps.get
5. mix test

Integration tests

Wand also has tests which run the wand binary against real mix projects to verify their behavior. You can run these with mix test --include external

Additionally, you can see the CLI output of each command with mix test --include external --include print

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