Managing Emojicode Packages with Yarn

The Yarn package manager can be used to install and manage packages for Emojicode. See its documentation for installation instructions.

It is important to set the name of the modules folder, into which Yarn will install packages. Emojicode requires this folder to be named packages. (See Packages)

This can be achieved with the command-line flag --modules-folder packages. Yet, of course, it is much simpler to place a file called .yarnrc with the same content in the main directory of your project and Yarn will take this into consideration with every command you run.

Tutorial: Installing the catsimulator Package

In this tutorial we are going to install the somewhat useless catsimulator package. Make sure that you have installed Yarn.

First off, let’s create a directory in which we can work.

mkdir zoo
cd zoo

Next, we create the main file of our project main.emojic:

📦 catsimulator 🏠

🏁 🍇
  🆕🐱❗️ ➡️ cat
  🎙cat❗️
🍉

The above code uses the catsimulator package, so the only thing left to do is installing it. Before using Yarn, let us create an appropriate .yarnrc:

echo "--modules-folder packages" > .yarnrc

Now, go ahead and add catsimulator to our project:

yarn add catsimulator

Once Yarn is finished, compile the project:

emojicodec main.emojic

If you run ./main now, you should actually see:

Meow

Granted, this is a pretty complicated way to print “Meow”. But we have seen how easy it is to download and install an Emojicode package with Yarn.

Preparing a Package for Use with Yarn

Publishing an Emojicode package with Yarn is like publishing any other package to npm. Please see Yarn’s documentation for further information on this topic.

One important thing, however, is to tell Yarn how to compile your package. Do not include any Emojicode binaries, object or interface files in your package. Let the Emojicode compiler create these files when the package is installed instead.

Below is an example from the catsimulator package’s package.json. It shows the instructions that are used to build the package when it is installed with Yarn.

{
  ...
  "scripts": {
    "preinstall": "emojicodec -p catsimulator main.emojic -O"
  }
  ...
}