Lock file and dev dependencies with opam

When developing an OCaml application or a library, it is sometimes convenient to have a way to ensure that every developer is using the exact same set of packages in their opam switches. It avoids spending hours understanding how all minor versions of every packages are interacting with each other.

This workflow is not the one advertised by default when using opam . But since the version 2 of opam, there is support for everything we need for a good sandbox setup. Namely: local switches, installing dependencies of a package without having to pin it, and lock files. You should definitely upgrade to opam2 if you haven't yet!

In addition to dependencies for the application itself, it is convenient to have a way of describing dependencies that are necessary only for people working on the development. This is the dev-dependencies field in package.json for npm/yarn.

I will try to describe what is my setup to work with a sandbox workflow.

Note that it works even better when opam is configured to use compilation cache.

Lock file The support for lock files is not included in opam by default. But there is a plugin which can be installed from opam and does everything I need. It is developed by the author of opam. So there should be nothing shady there. Installing the plugin and creating a lock file can be done in two commands. opam install opam-lock opam lock ./app.opam This will create a app.opam.locked file. This is a normal opam file. But it contains an exact version for all of the dependencies. The equivalent of npm install or yarn in a directory would be: opam install . --deps-only --locked This command will install all the opam packages that are defined in the current directory, using locked versions if available. . tells opam to search for opam files in the current directory.

tells opam to search for opam files in the current directory. --deps-only tells opam to only install the dependencies of the packages. Not the packages themselves. As the goal is to develop those packages, it is not necessary to have them installed.

tells opam to only install the dependencies of the packages. Not the packages themselves. As the goal is to develop those packages, it is not necessary to have them installed. --locked tells opam to take the locked version of an opam file if available. So when both app.opam and app.opam.locked are available, app.opam.locked will be used. If there are multiple packages in the same directory, and one wants to install only a subset of them, the expected packages must be specified during the install command. opam install ./app1.opam.locked ./app2.opam.locked --deps-only Once the lock file is created, new people starting to work on the project would setup their environment in one command: opam switch create . --deps-only --locked There is no need to specify an OCaml version when creating the switch. It is defined in the lock file. The --deps-only and --locked options have the same effects as described previously. I used to rely on opam switch export and opam switch import to simulate lock files. But it doesn't work as well. It contains all the extra packages that one might have in the switch for example. This is still the best solution if all the versions of all the packages must be fixed.

Development dependencies Unfortunately there is no support for dev dependencies in opam directly. More precisely there is a dev variable that can be used on the dependencies. But the dependencies marked like this will be installed when the package is pinned too. Which may not be the expected behavior. This is fine only for packages that are not meant to be published. My solution is to create an extra dev.opam file. This package will contain only dependencies. No build command is required. opam-version : "2.0" maintainer : "Louis Roché <louis@louisroche.net> authors : "Louis Roché <louis@louisroche.net> homepage : "https://github.com/Khady/ocaml-junit" bug-reports : "https://github.com/Khady/ocaml-junit/issues" depends : [ "merlin" "ocp-indent" "ocp-index" "opam-lock" "utop" ] Now, the opam install command described previously will also install all the dev dependencies. opam install . --deps-only --locked --locked is not required here, as there is no strict constrain on the versions of the dev dependencies. But I think it's a good practice to use it. For the record, the equivalent using the dev variable is: opam-version : "2.0" maintainer : "Louis Roché <louis@louisroche.net> authors : "Louis Roché <louis@louisroche.net> homepage : "https://github.com/Khady/ocaml-junit" bug-reports : "https://github.com/Khady/ocaml-junit/issues" license : "LGPLv3+ with OCaml linking exception" dev-repo : "git+https://github.com/Khady/ocaml-junit.git" doc : "https://khady.github.io/ocaml-junit/" tags : [ "junit" "jenkins" ] depends : [ "ocaml" { >= "4.02.3" } "jbuilder" { build & >= "1.0+beta10" } "ptime" "tyxml" { >= "4.0.0" } "odoc" { with- doc & >= "1.1.1" } "merlin" { dev } "ocp-indent" { dev } "ocp-index" { dev } "opam-lock" { dev } "utop" { dev } ]