Distributing Svelto through OpenUPM

The Unity Package Manager is a good effort from Unity to distribute project dependencies similarly to what NPM does. UPM is still in its infancy and some problems are to be addressed, among them the conflicts arising from common .net dll is the problem that annoys me the most.

Currently, Unity doesn’t provide a centralised registry where to find 3rd party projects. As workaround UPM leverages on the fact that it can import git projects as well. This feature, while extremely useful, is limited as well. For example, a package.json cannot reference a hard dependency to another git repository, unless external plugins are used.

Since I need this option to link automatically Svelto.Common to Svelto.ECS and Svelto.Tasks, I decided to accept the invite to use OpenUPM. I have zero experience with NPM and therefore I had to understand it from scratch. At first it’s not super intuitive, but it does the job.

The problem with .net dll dependencies

Like UPM, OpenUPM cannot automatically download external .net dlls and resolve possible conflicts. I hope the helpful author will introduce this feature as there is a chance that soon Svelto.Common and Svelto.ECS will depend on System.Runtime.CompilerServices.Unsafe.dll and potentially on System.Buffers and System.Memory too.

Currently adding System.Runtime.CompilerServices.Unsafe.dll directly in the code folder can result in conflicts with the same dll used by other packages. For example Unity.Collections uses it and Unity will refuse to compile if the same dll is found in two different folders. Workarounds to this problem exist, but they are awkward.

Updates are automatically available

One important benefit of using OpenUPM is that once the package is installed, it works like a normal Unity package. Updates do not need to be manually tracked, but they will be available as they are released.

Svelto.ECS and Svelto.Tasks on OpenUPM

Svelto.ECS and Svelto.Tasks can now be installed in Unity using OpenUPM. In order to do so, please follow this simple tutorial. For the first time use, you will need to download a command line tool (which needs node.js , follow the instructions on github), but it’s very simple. Once the package you choose is downloaded, the command line tool won’t need to be used anymore, unless you want to install another package from the OpenUPM registry.

Install Svelto.ECS through OpenUPM for the first time

Once you have downloaded the CLI tool, open your project and follow these instructions:

# Enter your unity project folder
$ cd YOUR_UNITY_PROJECT_FOLDER
# Install package
$ openupm add com.sebaslab.svelto.ecs

Once done, you will find Svelto as part of your packages

From now on Svelto.ECS and Svelto.Common will be automatically updated when new releases are deployed.

Deploy new releases with OpenUPM

This paragraph is not important for the final user and I wrote it in case you are thinking to use OpenUPM too. There are a couple of annoying bits to the deployment process: first one is Unity related. All the packages need to ship with the relative meta files which is problematic for a platform agnostic library like Svelto is. I don’t want to force people using c#, but not Unity, to manage meta files that they won’t need. To solve this problem, the standard solution is to create a UPM dedicated git branch. From now on Svelto.ECS, Svelto.Common and Svelto.Tasks will have UPM branches dedicated to Unity.

The second issue is due to the OpenUPM deployment process itself. At the moment is still too easy to make mistakes if the release is deployed manually. I hope the author will introduce some tools for simple projects like Svelto which don’t use any kind of automatic deployment (neither I intend to spend time in researching how to add one).

The OpenUPM steps to deploy a new release are currently:

• bump the release version inside the package.json
• create a new git release that must match the version in the package.json. Luckily a release can be created from any branch.