MixDepsAdd

Adds a mix task for auto-adding dependencies to mix.exs, if you happen to keep your mix.exs file's deps function in a simple canonical form.

$ mix deps.add httpoison hackney ../my_local_package
:httpoison, "~> 0.11.2"
:hackney, "~> 1.5.5"
:my_local_package, path: "../my_local_package"

For names without a slash, it looks up the latest released version on hex.pm; if there's a slash, it's treated as a local path.

Installation

Install its archive, so that it's available in all of your projects:

$ mix archive.install https://github.com/bryanstearns/mix_deps_add/releases/download/0.1.3/mix_deps_add-0.1.3.ez

Why?

I like how npm install --save <name> figures out the current version of the package and updates your package.json by itself, so I decided to make a Mix task to do it for my Elixir project dependencies. It's harder to do for Mix because mix.exs is freeform Elixir code, but since the deps function is pretty simple, I just require that it adheres to the usual format & content... for example:

  defp deps do
    [
      {:hackney, "~> 1.5.5"},
      {:httpoison, "~> 0.11.1"},
      {:my_local_package, path: "../my_local_package"},
      {:poison, "~> 3.1.0"}
    ]
  end

(This is what you'd get if you ran the example command above, if :poison was your only existing dependency.)

The rules for your deps/0 function

If these seem overly restrictive to you, please file an issue; I'm also open to pull requests!

• It starts with the only "defp deps do" line in the file
• It ends with the next "end" line
• It contains nothing but the list of dependencies, each on its own line, separated by commas, wrapped by square brackets
• No comments allowed (for now)

It doesn't care if the square brackets are on their own lines; it'll put them on their own lines and sort the dependencies alphabetically when it writes the file back out.

Yes, it's a bit of a hack, but It Works On My Machine, so I'm shipping it.

TODO, maybe

• support adding more than one dependency at a time
• support adding local projects with path:
• preserve comments within the deps function
• allow prerelease versions
• support "git:" dependencies
• add the trailing comma