Creating Protocols

A protocol is a user-defined series of steps requried to obtain a project from the internet. This section provides steps for ways to create and configure a protocol.

Note: The default method for obtaining a project from the internet is using Rust's curl library under the assumption that the project's URL is a .zip file. If you prefer a different method to access projects from the internet, then you must create a protocol.

Assumptions

If a step mentions the "protocol configuration", this corresponds to the entry for the protocol that has been defined in an Orbit configuration file (config.toml).

Configuring a protocol

This guide walks through how to add a protocol to be recognized by Orbit. In this guide, our protocol is called gitit.

Open an Orbit configuration file.
Make a new entry in the [[protocol]] array:

[[protocol]]
name = "gitit"
description = "Download projects using git"
command = ["git", "clone", "{{orbit.project.source}}", "-b", "{{orbit.project.version}}"]
patterns = ["*.git"]

A protocol may be as simple as a list of known command-line arguments, or may require invoking a script written in a scripting language such as Python or Tcl.

Tip: The strings within the array for the args field of a protocol support string variables. See String Swapping to view what variables are allowed.

Configuring a protocol as default

This guide walks through how to configure an existing protocol to be the first to check if it can be used for a given project's source URL.

Open an Orbit configuration file.
Add the default-protocol field in the [install] section, where the value is the name of a previously defined protocol (such as gitit):

[install]
default-protocol = "gitit"

Viewing available protocols

This guide walks through how to view the protocols already configured and available to use for a project.

Return the list of configured protocols:

$ orbit install --list

Return configuration data about a particular protocol, such as gitit:

$ orbit install --list --protocol gitit

Using a protocol

This guide walks through how to configure a particular project to use a previously configured protocol called gitit.

Open the current project's manifest file.
Add the source field to the project's manifest, which contains a string of the project's git repository:

[project]
# ...
source = "https://github.com/chaseruskin/gates.git"

Since this source ends with .git, it matches the pattern for the previously configured gitit protocol, so Orbit will use the gitit command and arguments to download the project.

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