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Nim for Bioinformatics

Installing libraries

Table of contents

  1. Installation
  2. Refresh the package list
  3. Search for a package
  4. Install a package

Nimble is the package manager for Nim. It can be used to create packages and to simplify the distribution of your modules and programs, but in this section I’ll focus on its use as a package manager to download and install Nim libraries.

Installation

Nimble is bundled with Nim since version 0.15.0, and given that this document is written for Nim 1.0+ we will assume it’s already installed in your system.

Refresh the package list

nimble refresh

Search for a package

Google is probably the best way to check in advance if a module is well maintained or provides the desired functionalities, the nimble.directory website is a good catalogue for nim packages.

Nevertheless, if you need to make a quick scan nimble search can be of some help:

nimble search csv

Will produce a list similar to:

csv:
  url:         https://github.com/achesak/nim-csv (git)
  tags:        csv, parsing, stringify, library
  description: Library for parsing, stringifying, reading, and writing CSV (comma separated value) files
  license:     MIT
  website:     https://github.com/achesak/nim-csv

[...]

csvtable:
  url:         https://github.com/apahl/csvtable (git)
  tags:        csv, table
  description: tools for handling CSV files (comma or tab-separated) with an API similar to Python's CSVDictReader and -Writer.
  license:     MIT
  website:     https://github.com/apahl/csvtable

Install a package

When the package name is available via nimble:

nimble install docopt

Sometimes, the latest version is not available via nimble, but it’s only available as the latest commit from the package’s repository:

nimble install docopt@#head

Nimble allows to install from URL:

nimble install https://github.com/nimble-test/multi

…also from subdirectories:

nimble install https://github.com/nimble-test/multi?subdir=alpha