ppm - Pulsar Package Manager

Discover and install Pulsar packages powered by pulsar-edit.dev.

ppm is bundled with the pulsar binaries so any ppm command can also be run with pulsar -p or pulsar --package.

You can configure ppm by using the ppm config command line option (recommended) or by manually editing the ~/.pulsar/.apmrc file as per the npm config.

Relation to npm

ppm bundles npm with it and spawns npm processes to install Pulsar packages. The major difference is that ppm sets multiple command line arguments to npm to ensure that native modules are built against Chromium's v8 headers instead of node's v8 headers.

The other major difference is that Pulsar packages are installed to ~/.pulsar/packages instead of a local node_modules folder and Pulsar packages are published to and installed from GitHub repositories instead of npmjs.com

Therefore you can think of ppm as a simple npm wrapper that builds on top of the many strengths of npm but is customized and optimized to be used for Pulsar packages.

Installing

ppm is bundled and installed automatically with Pulsar. You can run the Pulsar > Install Shell Commands menu option to install it again if you aren't able to run it from a terminal (macOS only).

Building

Clone the repository
🐧 Install libsecret-1-dev (or the relevant libsecret development dependency) if you are on Linux
Run npm install; this will install the dependencies with your built-in version of Node/npm, and then rebuild them with the bundled versions.
Run ./bin/npm test to run the specs (or .\bin\npm.cmd test on Windows)

Why `bin/npm` / `bin\npm.cmd`?

ppm includes npm, and spawns it for various processes. It also comes with a bundled version of Node, and this script ensures that npm uses the right version of Node for things like running the tests. If you're using the same version of Node as is listed in BUNDLED_NODE_VERSION, you can skip using this script.

Using

Run ppm help to see all the supported commands and ppm help <command> to learn more about a specific command.

The common commands are ppm install <package_name> to install a new package, ppm featured to see all the featured packages, and ppm publish to publish a package to pulsar-edit.dev.

Two-factor authentication?

If you have 2fa enabled on your GitHub account, you'll need to generate a personal access token and provide that when prompted for your password.

Behind a firewall?

If you are behind a firewall and seeing SSL errors when installing packages you can disable strict SSL by running:

ppm config set strict-ssl false

Using a proxy?

If you are using a HTTP(S) proxy you can configure ppm to use it by running:

ppm config set https-proxy https://9.0.2.1:0

You can run ppm config get https-proxy to verify it has been set correctly.

Viewing configuration

You can also run ppm config list to see all the custom config settings.