The Swift Package Manager (SwiftPM) is a tool for managing the distribution of Swift code. It’s integrated with the Swift build system to automate the process of downloading, compiling, and linking dependencies.

The Package Manager is included in Swift 3.0 and above.

Conceptual Overview

This section describes the basic concepts that motivate the functionality of the Swift Package Manager.

Modules

Swift organizes code into modules. Each module specifies a namespace and enforces access controls on which parts of that code can be used outside of the module.

A program may have all of its code in a single module, or it may import other modules as dependencies. Aside from the handful of system-provided modules, such as Darwin on macOS or Glibc on Linux, most dependencies require code to be downloaded and built in order to be used.

When you use a separate module for code that solves a particular problem, that code can be reused in other situations. For example, a module that provides functionality for making network requests can be shared between a photo sharing app and a weather app. Using modules lets you build on top of other developers’ code rather than reimplementing the same functionality yourself.

Packages

A package consists of Swift source files and a manifest file. The manifest file, called Package.swift, defines the package’s name and its contents using the PackageDescription module.

A package has one or more targets. Each target specifies a product and may declare one or more dependencies.

Products

A target may build either a library or an executable as its product. A library contains a module that can be imported by other Swift code. An executable is a program that can be run by the operating system.

Dependencies

A target’s dependencies are modules that are required by code in the package. A dependency consists of a relative or absolute URL to the source of the package and a set of requirements for the version of the package that can be used. The role of the package manager is to reduce coordination costs by automating the process of downloading and building all of the dependencies for a project. This is a recursive process: A dependency can have its own dependencies, each of which can also have dependencies, forming a dependency graph. The package manager downloads and builds everything that is needed to satisfy the entire dependency graph.

Example Usage

In Getting Started, a simple command-line tool is built with the Swift Package Manager.

To provide a more complete look at what the Swift Package Manager can do, the following example consists of three interdependent packages:

• PlayingCard - Defines PlayingCard, Suit, and Rank types.
• DeckOfPlayingCards - Defines a Deck type that shuffles and deals an array of PlayingCard values.
• Dealer - Defines an executable that creates a DeckOfPlayingCards, shuffles it, and deals the first 10 cards.

You can build and run the complete example by downloading the source code of the Dealer project from GitHub and running the following commands:

$ git clone https://github.com/apple/example-package-dealer.git
$ cd example-package-dealer
$ swift run dealer <count>

Creating a Library Package

We’ll start by creating a target representing a playing card in a standard 52-card deck. The PlayingCard target defines the PlayingCard type, which consists of a Suit enumeration value (Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts, Spades) and a Rank enumeration value (Ace, Two, Three, …, Jack, Queen, King).

public enum Rank: Int {
    case two = 2
    case three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten
    case jack, queen, king, ace
}

public enum Suit: String {
    case spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs
}

public struct PlayingCard {
    let rank: Rank
    let suit: Suit
}

By convention, a target includes any source files located in the Sources/<target-name> directory.

example-package-playingcard
├── Sources
│   └── PlayingCard
│       ├── PlayingCard.swift
│       ├── Rank.swift
│       └── Suit.swift
└── Package.swift

Because the PlayingCard target does not produce an executable, it can be described as a library. A library is a target that builds a module which can be imported by other packages. By default, a library module exposes all of the public types and methods declared in source code located in the Sources/<target-name> directory.

When creating a library package intended for use as a dependency in other projects, the Package.swift manifest must reside at the top level/root of the package directory structure.

Run swift build to start the Swift build process. If everything worked correctly, it will compile the Swift module for PlayingCard.

The complete code for the PlayingCard package can be found at https://github.com/apple/example-package-playingcard.

Importing Dependencies

The DeckOfPlayingCards package brings in the previous package: It defines a Deck type.

To use the PlayingCards module, the DeckOfPlayingCards package must declare the package as a dependency in its Package.swift manifest file.

// swift-tools-version:5.3
import PackageDescription

let package = Package(
    name: "DeckOfPlayingCards",
    products: [
        .library(name: "DeckOfPlayingCards", targets: ["DeckOfPlayingCards"]),
    ],
    dependencies: [
        .package(url: "https://github.com/apple/example-package-playingcard.git", from: "3.0.0"),
    ],
    targets: [
        .target(
            name: "DeckOfPlayingCards",
            dependencies: ["PlayingCard"]),
        .testTarget(
            name: "DeckOfPlayingCardsTests",
            dependencies: ["DeckOfPlayingCards"]),
    ]
)

Each dependency specifies a source URL and version requirements. The source URL is a URL accessible to the current user that resolves to a Git repository. The version requirements, which follow Semantic Versioning (SemVer) conventions, are used to determine which Git tag to check out and use to build the dependency. For the PlayingCard dependency will use the most recent version with a major version equal to 3.

When the swift build command is run, the Package Manager downloads all of the dependencies, compiles them, and links them to the package module. This allows DeckOfPlayingCards to access the public members of its dependent modules with import statements.

You can see the downloaded sources in the .build/checkouts directory at the root of your project, and intermediate build products in the .build directory at the root of your project.

The complete code for the DeckOfPlayingCards package can be found at https://github.com/apple/example-package-deckofplayingcards.

Resolving transitive dependencies

With everything else in place, now you can build the Dealer module. The Dealer module depends on the DeckOfPlayingCards package, which in turn depends on the PlayingCard package. However, because the Swift Package Manager automatically resolves transitive dependencies, you only need to declare the DeckOfPlayingCards package as a dependency.

// swift-tools-version:5.5

import PackageDescription

let package = Package(
    name: "dealer",
    products: [
        .executable(name: "Dealer", targets: ["Dealer"]),
    ],
    dependencies: [
        .package(url: "https://github.com/apple/example-package-deckofplayingcards.git", from: "3.0.0"),
    ],
    targets: [
        .target(
            name: "Dealer",
            dependencies: ["DeckOfPlayingCards"]),
    ]
)

Swift requires that a source file import the modules for any types that are referenced in code. For the Dealer module’s main.swift file, the Deck type from DeckOfPlayingCards and the PlayingCard type from PlayingCard are referenced.

import DeckOfPlayingCards

let numberOfCards = 10

var deck = Deck.standard52CardDeck()
deck.shuffle()

for _ in 1...numberOfCards {
    guard let card = deck.deal() else {
        print("No More Cards!")
        break
    }

    print(card)
}

By convention, a target containing a file named main.swift in its directory produces an executable.

Running the swift build command starts the Swift build system to produce the Dealer executable, which can be run from the .build/debug directory.

$ swift build
$ ./.build/debug/Dealer
♠︎6
♢K
♢2
♡8
♠︎7
♣︎10
♣︎5
♢A
♡Q
♡7

The complete code for the Dealer package can be found at https://github.com/apple/example-package-dealer.

For more information about using the Swift Package Manager, see the documentation provided in the Swift Package Manager project on GitHub.