This short tutorial covers the very basic use cases to get you started with OPAM. A more lengthy introduction can be found in the Advanced Usage guide.
opam init
This will create the ~/.opam
directory, within which packages will be
installed and where OPAM will store its data.
The following commands will enable you to obtain information on available packages:
opam list -a # List all available packages
opam search QUERY # List packages with QUERY in their name or description
opam show PACKAGE # Display information about PACKAGE
You may prefer to browse them online. If you
find a package there but not on your computer, either it has been recently added
and you should simply run opam update
, or it's not available on your system or
OCaml version -- opam install PACKAGE
should give you the reason.
The two commands you will probably use the most with OPAM are:
opam update # Update the packages database
opam install PACKAGE # Download, build and install the latest version of PACKAGE
You may want to regularly issue these commands to keep your packages up-to-date:
opam update # Update the packages database
opam upgrade # Re-install packages that were updated since last upgrade
If you need more details and options, OPAM is self-documented through
opam --help
To learn how to use more advanced features of OPAM (package pinning, multiple repositories, multiple compilers...), move on to the Advanced Usage guide, or the Packaging tutorial.