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API

This page describes the new high level API of coursier, being added since 1.1.0-M10. It's still subject to source / binary compatibility breakages, even though its general outline shouldn't change much.

The high level API of coursier aims at being as simple to use as its CLI, with sensible defaults in particular, while retaining the purity of the low-level API.

It exposes a few objects under the coursier namespace, most notably coursier.Resolve and coursier.Fetch, allowing to resolve dependencies and fetch their artifacts.

Resolve

The coursier.Resolve object exposes methods to run resolutions, that is finding all the transitive dependencies of some intial dependencies (while reconciling their versions at the same time).

This entirely relies on metadata, that is POM or maven-metadata.xml files for Maven repositories, and ivy.xml files for Ivy repositories.

If you're fine with all the defaults (cache location, resolution parameters, …), you can just resolve some dependencies with

import coursier._

val resolution = Resolve.resolve(
  Seq(dep"org.tpolecat:doobie-core_2.12:0.6.0")
)

This runs the resolution synchronously. The resolveFuture and resolveIO methods allow to run resolutions in the background, either eagerly via scala.concurrent.Future, or lazily via an IO monad.

resolution is a coursier.core.Resolution, which represents the (final) state of the resolution. It has various methods allowing to process dependencies, most notably minDependencies, returning a set of dependencies (with redundant dependencies stripped).

The resolve* methods accept a number of optional parameters, discussed below.

Repositories

The default repositories are the Ivy2 local repository (only on the JVM) and Maven Central. More details here. These can be overridden by passing a repositories parameter, like

import coursier._
import coursier.util.Repositories

val resolution = Resolve.resolve(
  Seq(dep"sh.almond:scala-kernel-api_2.12.8:0.2.2"),
  repositories = Resolve.defaultRepositories :+ Repositories.jitpack
)

Philosophy

Most methods in the coursier.Resolve and coursier.Fetch objects should be referentially transparent. At the same time, in order to make them more convenient to use, plenty of their inputs have sensible default values. These default values may in turn, trigger some side-effects, like checking if some directories exist (to find the cache location), starting thread pools (to later download things from), or checking some environment variables and Java properties. If you pass all these methods inputs explicitly, not relying on default values at all, you'll recover referential transparency.

Some methods download things, read from and write to the cache, that is perform some I/O. They return a value wrapped in an IO monad, coursier.util.Task by default. These methods also have sibling methods, either returning a scala.concurrent.Future, or returning the underlying value synchronously, so that one can just ignore any IO monad consideration if they want to. Also, any IO monad with a coursier.util.Schedulable instance can be used instead of the (minimalist and probably low end) coursier.util.Task. The cats-interop and scalaz-interop have such instances for cats-effect and scalaz 7.2.x.