Can you not commit dependencies to source with OpenWrap?

Question

I know in nuget you can avoid committing dependencies to source by using "Enable Package Restore" command. This will allow another developer to checkout the solution, and by building it to download all the required dependencies.

Is there a similar way to achieve this in OpenWrap?

Answer 1

With OpenWrap you can do something similar: you simply put the whole "wraps" folder on the ignore list for your version control system. After checkout, you simply issue the following command to download the dependencies:

o update-wrap

It's as simple as that. That is the way I personally always use openwrap: I never commit the dependencies into the version control system.

Are there drawbacks to this approach? No, but you have to take into account that the "update-wrap" command always fetches the most recent dependencies that satisfy your dependency requirements (you can specify both lower and upper limit for the version). This means that developer A might have more recent dependencies than developer B. In my case, this has never been a problem, and I even think that, during development, one should issue "update-wrap" from time to time to make sure that one is always developing against the most recent dependencies.

Btw, it is technically possible to integrate the call to "update-wrap" in the build, so that each build triggers an update of the dependencies. But personally, I never saw a need for that.