InstantiateFromURL

A way to bind dependency information to Julia assets without the need to pass around TOML files

Will download, unpack, and activate a tarball of the resources in pwd/.projects

Based on Valentin Churavy's idea in JuliaLang/IJulia.jl#673 (comment)

Overview

GitHub repositories are expected to include a Project.toml and Manifest.toml file in the root directory, and all other files are ignored. For ex: QuantEcon/QuantEconLecturePackages

All of the following are valid calls:

• activate_github("QuantEcon/QuantEconLecturePackages"), which saves to .projects/QuantEconLecturePackages-master
• activate_github("QuantEcon/QuantEconLecturePackages", tag = "master"), which gives us the same thing.
• activate_github("QuantEcon/QuantEconLecturePackages", tag = "v0.9.5"), which saves that version to .projects/QuantEconLecturePackages-v0.9.5
• activate_github("QuantEcon/QuantEconLecturePackages", sha = "0c2985"), which saves that commit to .projects/QuantEconLecturePackages-0c2985

You can also call any of the above with ; force = true, which will force a re-download of the source resources.

You can also include an add_default_environment = true in your calls, which will Pkg.add() (at once) the packages grabbed to your default (~/.julia/environments/v1.0) environment. This way, packages/versions you install via InstantiateFromURL are immediately available, and can avoid teaching people about environments.

There's also a non-exported copy_env(reponame, oldprefix, newprefix) which will let you:

activate_github("QuantEcon/QuantEconLecturePackages")
copy_env("QuantEcon/QuantEconLecturePackages", "master", "mymaster")
activate_github("QuantEcon/QuantEconLecturePackages", tag = "mymaster") # Protected from future updates. 

No GitHub API calls are consumed, so rate-limiting is not an issue