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What & Why

esy is a rapid workflow for developing Reason/OCaml projects. It supports native packages hosted on opam and npm.

For npm users​

esy lets you manage native Reason/OCaml projects with a familiar npm-like workflow:

  • Declare dependencies in package.json.

  • Run the esy command within your project to download/build dependencies.

  • Share and consume individual Reason/OCaml package sources on the npm registry or Github.

  • Access packages published on opam (a package registry for OCaml) via @opam npm scope (for example @opam/lwt to pull lwt library from opam).

  • Easily bundle your project into a self contained, prebuilt binary package and share it on npm. These can be installed by anyone using plain npm.

For opam users​

esy provides a fast and powerful workflow for local development of opam packages without requiring "switches". Opam packages are still accessible, and you can publish your packages to opam repository.

  • Manages OCaml compilers and dependencies on a per project basis.

  • Isolates each package environment by exposing only those packages which are defined as dependencies.

  • Fast parallel builds which are aggressively cached (even across different projects).

  • Keeps the ability to use packages published on opam repository.

In depth​

  • Project metadata is managed inside package.json.

  • Parallel builds.

  • Clean environment builds for reproducibility.

  • Global build cache automatically shared across all projects — initializing new projects is often cheap.

  • File system checks to prevent builds from mutating locations they don't own.

  • Solves environment variable pain. Native toolchains rely heavily on environment variables, and esy makes them behave predictably, and usually even gets them out of your way entirely.

  • Allows symlink style workflows for local development using link: dependencies. Allows you to work on several projects locally, automatically rebuilding any linked dependencies that have changed. There is no need to first register a package as "linkable".

  • Run commands in project environment quickly esy <anycommand>.