Add Dependency

Add a dependency to your project by using acton pkg add. The usual flow is to refresh the public package index first:

acton pkg update

Then add the dependency by package name:

acton pkg add foo

You can also provide a GitHub repository URL directly. The first argument is still the local dependency name:

In this case we add the example foo package as a dependency.

acton pkg add foo --repo-url https://github.com/actonlang/foo --repo-ref main

This will fetch the dependency and add it to the dependencies block in Build.act, resulting in something like:

dependencies = {
  "foo": (
        repo_url="https://github.com/actonlang/foo",
        repo_ref="main",
        url="https://github.com/actonlang/foo/archive/0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef01234567.zip",
        hash="1220cd47344f8a1e7fe86741c7b0257a63567b4c17ad583bddf690eedd672032abdd",
    ),
}

zig_dependencies = {}

The dependency key is the import prefix. In the example above, the key is "foo", so modules from that dependency are imported under foo.

src/lib.act is the dependency's root module. If the foo package defines a foo function in src/lib.act, we can access it from our main actor:

import foo

actor main(env):
    print(foo.foo())
    env.exit(0)

For a repository containing multiple Acton projects, select a project with --subdir:

acton pkg add widgets --repo-url https://github.com/example/monorepo --subdir packages/widgets

You can also combine --subdir with --url for a direct archive URL. The dependency declaration records the selection:

dependencies = {
    "widgets": (
        url="https://example.com/monorepo.tar.gz",
        hash="...",  # Filled in by acton pkg add
        subdir="packages/widgets",
    ),
}

subdir is the path to the project within the archive. Omit the outer wrapper directory, such as monorepo-<commit>, from this path.

Acton preserves the fetched package's directory layout, so the selected project can use a sibling dependency such as path="../common". Multiple dependencies can select different projects from the same archive and share its hash.

Omitting subdir selects the archive root. acton pkg upgrade preserves the selection. Running acton pkg add again also preserves it unless you supply --subdir; use --subdir . to select the root explicitly.