flotsam

flotsam is a project generator and dependency manager for C.

How It Works

Flotsam is a tool for overall C project development and management. At the outset, Flotsam can be used to generate a new application or library project. It goes a step further by managing dependencies through definition in the Flotsam.toml file. The Flotsam.toml file lives in the root of the repository and defines the project.

A few fields are required to exist and be populated like; name, repository, build, etc. The dependency section is required however not needed to be populated. The dependency will be brought down, built, and installed to the system.

Requirements

Flotsam has strong opinions. It puts the built dependencies in /usr/local/lib. Flotsam keeps all dependencies in a cache directory in the users home dir. One of the primary requirements though of Flotsam is that a Flotsam dependency needs to be a git repository and must create a shared object in the form of a .so or a .dylib after having a single build command ran. The build command is defined in the Flotsam.toml file. All examples use make.

Example

In the following example we'll create a new application using Flotsam, write a small program that depends on an external library, compile, and run the appliction entirely using Flotsam.

Create a new application. Flotsam will create all of the necessary files with the appropriate contents to write and build a new application.

flotsam new --bin my_new_app

Add the below code to main.c:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>

#include "spinner.h"

int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    spinner_t *s = spinner_new(19);
    s->delay = 100000;
    s->prefix = "Running ";
    s->suffix = " I'm a suffix";
    s->final_msg = "\nComplete!\n";
    spinner_start(s);
    sleep(5); // simulate some work
    spinner_stop(s);
    spinner_free(s);
    return 0;
}

In the Flotsam.toml "dependencies" section, add the following line:

"github.com/briandowns/libspinner" = "0.3.1"

Now run flotsam update. Flotsam parses the Flotsam.toml file, clones, checks out the given branch or tag, performs a build of the dependency, and makes it available for linking and execution. Then run flotsam build. At this point, if there were not errors, the application has been built and the resulting binary has been placed in the bin directory.

Run the application:

./bin/my_new_app

Features

• Create new applications and libraries including file and directory scaffolding.
• Ready to use Dockerfile for binary applications.

Test

make test

Installation

• MacOS and Linux

make install

• FreeBSD

gmake install

Contributing

Please feel free to open a PR!

License

flotsam source code is available under the BSD 2 clause License.

Contact

@bdowns328