opam-publish

A tool to ease contributions to opam repositories.

So you have followed the initial steps of the Packaging Guide and have your package pinned and installed through OPAM locally. Now you want to contribute to the official or a third-party repository to make it widely available. This is where opam-publish will come in handy.

tl;dr

If your project is on Github

From your package source tree:

1. Tag your repository (git tag -a), and push to Github (git push origin <tag>)
2. opam-publish prepare
3. Check and fix files in the shown sub-directory
4. opam-publish submit
5. Follow pull-request on Github; repeat 3. and 4. if needed.

Otherwise

1. Host your package archive somewhere, eg. http://someproject.com/someproject-1.0.tar.gz
2. opam-publish prepare someproject.1.0 "http://someproject.com/someproject-1.0.tar.gz"
3. Edit someproject.1.0/opam, someproject.1.0/descr
4. opam-publish submit someproject.1.0
5. Follow pull-request on Github; repeat 3. and 4. if needed.

Step 0: a hosted archive

Your package source needs to be available somewhere on the web for people to download and install. Pack it as a tar.gz, tar.bz2 or zip archive, and put it on an https, http or ftp server.

If you're using a source hosting service, they probably handle serving archives for you as well. For example, on Github, declaring a release of your software will provide you with an address of the form https://github.com/<name>/<project>/archive/<tag>.tar.gz which is fine for our purpose.

Step 1: opam-publish prepare

This command gathers all required information for a full OPAM package. With <url> the url of your hosted archive, simply run:

opam-publish prepare <package>.<version> <url>

This will generate a <package>.<version> directory containing the full package definition:

• A descr file with your package description. First line should be a short summary, and you can detail below. This is important, it is what people will see when they browse for your package.
• An opam file with package details and specs.
• A url file that was generated from the URL you provided.

On your first run, if the package didn't exist already, descr is just a template and opam may need details. Make sure to write a clear description in descr, and to provide contact information and details in the opam file. On subsequent runs, or if you're updating an existing package, everything should be filled in already.

That's it: once you're satisfied with the descr and opam files, you can go on.

Step 2: opam-publish submit

We'll suppose you want to submit to the official OPAM repository on Github. If not, see the next paragraph.

Repository additions are handled through Github pull-requests, so you'll need a Github account to track your request. You can create one quickly here. Opam-publish will ask for your login and password the first time to generate an auth token, they won't be kept.

Simply run:

opam-publish submit <dir>

where <dir> is the directory of the form <package>.<version> from the step above. This will perform a validation step on the package, just fix any errors and try again if it doesn't pass.

You'll then be directed to the pull-request page submitted on Github. There, you'll find the content of your pull-request, the result of the automated tests, the discussion on this request and its status (open, merged into the repository, or closed).

If any change is requested by the maintainers, you can simply update your files and run opam-publish submit again to update the pull-request. It's also possible to run prepare again e.g. to synchronize with a new archive.

Using third-party repositories

While it will submit to the official OPAM repository by default, you can easily add any other remote to submit to. At the moment, however, only Github is supported as backend ; a simpler git format-patch and mail interface is planned.

Use:

opam-publish repo add <name> <user>/<repo>

to add a new remote repository referring to the Github repo <user>/<repo>, e.g. ocaml/opam for the default one. Then specify --repo <name> to the opam-publish submit command.