(E) The Filters menu and the Clear Filters button display on all lists except the Built-in list. Filtering allows you to narrow down which packages appear in the list.
(H) The list view, which displays packages that match the filter and search parameters you specify. The All tab lists all packages that meet your filter and search criteria, while the Services tab filters the list further to display servicesA Unity facility that provides a growing range of complimentary services to help you make games and engage, retain and monetize audiences. More info
See in Glossary.
(I) The detail view, which displays information specific to the feature set or packageA container that stores various types of features and assets for Unity, including Editor or Runtime tools and libraries, Asset collections, and project templates. Packages are self-contained units that the Unity Package Manager can share across Unity projects. Most of the time these are called packages, but occasionally they are called Unity Package Manager (UPM) packages. More info
See in Glossary selected in the list.
(J) The package details tabs, which display further information about the selected feature set or package. The tabs are dynamic, based on the selected item. For information about these tabs, see Details view.
(L) The status bar, which displays information when the Package Manager loads packages and feature sets. This information includes errors and warning messages, the number of Asset Store packages available, and a link to load more Asset Store packages.
(M) The Refresh list button lets you refresh the list of packages displayed. In the My Assets context, Refresh list is a menu, which contains a Check for updates option, so you can check for updates to all packages on your computer; not just the ones that are visible in the My Assets context.
In addition, what happens if you find a better tool that you want to use instead of the current one, or a new version of your dependency is released that you want to update to? This is not too painful for a couple of dependencies, but in larger projects with many dependencies, this kind of thing can become really challenging to keep track of. It makes more sense to use a package manager such as npm, as this will guarantee that the code is added and removed cleanly, as well as a host of other advantages.
The package manager will provide a method to install new dependencies (also referred to as "packages"), manage where packages are stored on your file system, and offer capabilities for you to publish your own packages.
In theory, you may not need a package manager and you could manually download and store your project dependencies, but a package manager will seamlessly handle installing and uninstalling packages. If you didn't use one, you'd have to manually handle:
Note: npm is not the only package manager available. A successful and popular alternative package manager is Yarn. Yarn resolves the dependencies using a different algorithm that can mean a faster user experience. There are also a number of other emerging clients, such as pnpm.
For a package manager to work, it needs to know where to install packages from, and this comes in the form of a package registry. The registry is a central place where a package is published and thus can be installed from. npm, as well as being a package manager, is also the name of the most commonly-used package registry for JavaScript packages. The npm registry exists at npmjs.com.
Once that's done All The Things, we're now ready for some "modern client-side development" (which really means using build tools to make the developer experience a little easier). First of all however, take another look at your package.json file. You'll see that npm has added a new field, dependencies:
Now we're ready to benefit from the full JavaScript package ecosystem. For a start, there is now a local web server running at :1234. Go there now and you'll not see anything for now, but what is cool is that when you do make changes to your app, Parcel will rebuild it and refresh the server automatically so you can instantly see the effect your update had.
Now for some page content. Let's say we want to show human-readable relative dates, such as "2 hours ago", "4 days ago" and so on. The date-fns package's formatDistanceToNow() method is useful for this (there's other packages that do the same thing too).
There's a lot of tools available and the JavaScript package ecosystem is growing at an unprecedented rate, which has pros and cons. There's improvements being made all the time and the choice, for better or worse, is constantly increasing. Faced with the overwhelming choice of tooling, probably the most important lesson is to learn what the tool you select is capable of.
This tutorial installed the Parcel package using npm, but as mentioned earlier on there are some alternatives. It's worth at least knowing they exist and having some vague idea of the common commands across the tools. You've already seen some in action, but let's look at the others.
Note: The npm package manager is not required to install packages from the npm registry, even though they share the same name. pnpm and Yarn can consume the same package.json format as npm, and can install any package from the npm and other package registries.
As shown above, this will prompt and walk you through a series of questions to describe your project (name, license, description, and so on) then generate a package.json for you that contains meta-information about your project and its dependencies.
This will check all of the dependency tree for your project and run the specific versions you're using against a vulnerability database and notify you if there are potential vulnerable packages in your project.
This command will show what version of a dependency is installed and how it came to be included in your project. It's possible that another, top-level, package could have pulled in date-fns. It's equally possible (and not ideal) that you have multiple versions of a package in your project (this has been seen many times over with the lodash package, as it's so useful).
If you tried running this in your Parcel test project from earlier it would (likely) claim the "dev script is missing". This is because npm, Yarn (and the like) are looking for a property called dev in the scripts property of your package.json file.
The package manager will provide a method to install new dependencies (also referred to as \"packages\"), manage where packages are stored on your file system, and offer capabilities for you to publish your own packages.
Once that's done All The Things, we're now ready for some \"modern client-side development\" (which really means using build tools to make the developer experience a little easier). First of all however, take another look at your package.json file. You'll see that npm has added a new field, dependencies:
Now for some page content. Let's say we want to show human-readable relative dates, such as \"2 hours ago\", \"4 days ago\" and so on. The date-fns package's formatDistanceToNow() method is useful for this (there's other packages that do the same thing too).
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