Pantries provide consistent metadata about open source packages. This metadata shouldn’t require manual collection, but at this current state in open source it does.

It is collected and duplicated thousands of times. A huge waste of effort.

tea aims to eradicate this wasted effort, though unfortunately, the journey there will require—to some extent—doing that duplication one more time.

Our format is YAML, which is at least non-proprietary and could be used by other tools without an independent parser. And we’re pulling in data from other sources as much as possible, eg. versions are taken from the “source” whenever possible.

Assuming you have tea (w/magic) installed:

$ git clone https://github.com/teaxyz/pantry

$ cd pantry
# all the following commands operate in `./tea.out`
# your tea installation remains untouched

$ pkg init
# ^^ creates a “wip” package.yml
# ^^ if you already know the name, you can pass it as an argument

$ pkg edit
# ^^ opens the new package.yml in your EDITOR

$ pkg build
# ^^ needs a zero permissions GITHUB_TOKEN to use the GitHub API
# either set `GITHUB_TOKEN` or run `gh auth login`

$ foo
# ^^ anything in the `provides:` key will now run

$ pkg test
# ^^ you need to write a test that verifies the package works

$ gh repo fork
$ git branch -m my-new-package
$ git push origin my-new-package
$ gh pr create

• pkg can be run without magic via tea -E pkg (this dev-env provides +tea.xyz/brewkit).
• gh can be run without magic via tea gh.
• git can be run without magic via tea git.
• pkg build and pkg test take a -L flag to run in a Linux Docker container
• All commands take an optional pkg-spec eg. pkg build zlib.net^1.1

While inside a pantry dev-env you can run commands from any built packages provided you specified their provides: key.

pantry also works in GitHub Codespaces. The default configuration provides with the repository will install/update tea at the time you attach, so you should be able to quickly work on or test packages in a remote linux environment (or work from a device with just a web browser).

If the package you want to add to tea can be executed simply eg. you want foo to run npx foo, then you can add a one-line entry to npmjs.com/provider.yml.

We currently also support this for pipx. Adding support for other such dependency manager execution handlers is easy and welcome.

At this time, if the package has tea dependencies or requires compilation, it should be packaged as a package.yml.

Packaging can be cumbersome. Our wiki is our packaging knowledge base. For other assistance, start a discussion.

We build “bottles” (tar’d binaries) and upload them to both our centralized bottle storage and decentralized IPFS.

tea automatically builds new releases of packages as soon as they are released (usually starting the builds within seconds). There is no need to submit PRs for updates.

Packaging can be fiddly so we all pitch in. If you want to help someone else with their pull request then you can use GitHub’s CLI:

$ gh pr checkout 123

# or you can copy paste the URL:
$ gh pr checkout https://github.com/teaxyz/pantry/pull/123

# then open for editing:
$ pkg edit