CSPM: A package manager for Csound

This project is a prototype package management system for the Csound programming language. It is an attempt to enable easy re-use of CSD and UDO files using a centralised repository (living on Github).

Both UDOs and CSD files are accessible by creating an appropriate package for the component, creating a repository and release on Github and by adding the entries to the cspm-registry.

Installation

CSPM is available from the npm registry and can be installed globally with the following command.

npm install -g cspm

Csound's INCDIR variable must then be set in your path. This is the location where packages are installed.

Commands

Initialisation

A UDO package may be initialised either inside of an empty directory or a directory containing a .udo or .csd file. This is done using the the following commands.

cspm init udo

or

cspm init csd

This will initialise a setup guide to create a UDO or CSD cspm.json file. If the cspm.json already exists the setup script will try to ascertain information about the module such as name and the various inputs/outputs/macros. If not, these can be manually specified using the command prompt.

For both UDOs and CSDs the init command creates a csp.json file containing the name, version, author, email and description information. For UDOs the various inputs and outputs are also enumerated. For each input/output the name, type, rate, description, maximum and minimum values are also recorded. For CSDs the macros within the file are enumerated and a description of each macro may also be provided.

Build

ReadMe

If a csp.json file exists inside of a package a README.md file may be generated automatically from the data by invoking:

cspm build readme

No other build commands are implemented at this time.

Install

Packages may be installed using the following command:

cspm install user/repo/version

or to install latest

cspm install user/repo

Packages are installed to the directory specified as Csound's INCDIR environmental variable, this variable must be specified or the installation of packages will fail. If a package to be install contains dependencies, these dependencies will also be installed.

Linking

macOS and Linux only

Installed csd packages may be linked to the /usr/local/bin path enabling the calling of csd files in a similar fashion to bash scripts. Arguments may be passed to csd files if the csd file contains defined macros, the script will prompt for the macro values when it have been run, csd packages may be linked using the link command:

cspm link MyGreatPackage

The csd may then be invoked using the following command:

MyGreatPackage arg1 arg2 ... argN

If arguments are needed for the specified macros the script will prompt the user to enter each one, if the script is already given the correct number of arguments it will just run normally.