Wares is a package manager compatible with all your favorite build tools. This includes both Premake and CMake in a very similar API.

Wares was designed out of the need for a quick, painless, and easy way to install packages for premake and cmake projects. It was designed because the alternatives failed in one of the following ways:

1. No global cache directory
2. No easy install from a buildscript
3. No Premake/CMake support. (The former was particularly apparent)
4. Smooth build system integration

Our baseline philosophy is to be fast, lightweight and a joy to use.

• Updater script
• Premake5!
• CMake!
• package lock file (wares.lock)
• global package cache! (WARES_CACHE environment command line variable)
• enable/disable package groups
  • should only be able to effect your own locality, not others

• logging into Git

• Github
• Gitlab
• Bitbucket
• Private repositories
• URLs
• Binary packages
• pkg-config

• By release, tag, or commit
• Versioning follows the cargo versioning schema.

The first thing you will need to setup is a wares.json file. This specifies the various dependencies to download into your project. An example of this file is below:

{
	"version": 0,
	"dependencies": [
		"gh:gabime/spdlog@^1.14.0"
	]
}

As you can see, this project depends on spdlog at or above version 1.14.0, but not 2.0.0. As of writing this document, only two versions are available that fit this requirement 1.14.0 and 1.14.1. As such, wares would chose and download the 1.14.1 version from Github.

To use wares with your premake file, simply add premake/get_wares.lua somewhere in your file directory. Then, in your top-level premake file, add: include "PATH_TO_GET_WARES.LUA". get_wares.lua should automatically install wares.lua into your source tree and will keep it up to date.

A (very simplified) example of using wares in a script is below (using the previous dependencies.json file):

wares = include("get_wares.lua")

local deps = wares.sync()

-- spdlog doesn't have a premake script, so we'll create a project for it
project "spdlog"
	kind "StaticLib"
	language "C  "
	cppdialect "C  20"

	files {
		deps["spdlog"] .. "/src/**.cpp",
		deps["spdlog"] .. "/include/**.h"
	}

	defines {
		"SPDLOG_COMPILED_LIB",
		"SPDLOG_USE_STD_FORMAT"
	}

	includedirs {
		deps["spdlog"] .. "/include/"
	}

project "App"
	kind "ConsoleApp"
	language "C  "

	files {
		"src/main.cpp"
	}

	-- link spdlog and add the include directories
	links { "spdlog" }
	includedirs { deps["spdlog"] .. "/include/" }

To use wares with your cmake file, simply add cmake/get_wares.cmake somewhere in your file directory. Then, in your top-level premake file, add: include(PATH_TO_GET_WARES.CMAKE). get_wares.cmake should automatically install wares.lua into your source tree and will keep it up to date.

A (very simplified) example of using wares in a CMakeLists.txt file is below (using the previous dependencies.json file):

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.19)
include(get_wares.cmake)

project(App)

wares_sync()

add_executable(App src/main.cpp)

# spdlog is now included in the project, link it
target_link_libraries(App spdlog)

Could:

• install packages/update lockfile
• clean cache
• debug installation issues
• add packages to the wares.json file
• export dependencies to other formats (meson wrap, bdep, etc.)