Recommended workflow for local development in a polyrepo setup

[nwsepl]

Context

We have the following polyrepo setup:

dsl: Defines and packages our Pkl schemas

amends "pkl:Project"

package {
  name = "dsl"
  baseUri = "package://pkg.pkl-lang.org/github.com/org/\(name)"
  version = "1.0.0-SNAPSHOT"
  packageZipUrl =
    "https://github.com/org/\(name)/releases/download/\(name)@\(version)/\(name)@\(version).zip"
}

compiler: Imports dsl package to generate Java code via Gradle plugin

amends "pkl:Project"

dependencies {
  ["dsl"] = import("package://pkg.pkl-lang.org/github.com/org/dsl@1.0.0-SNAPSHOT")
}

Question

What is the recommended workflow for iterating on dsl locally and testing those changes in compiler without publishing releases to GitHub?
Conceptually, we are looking for something similar to publishing to a local repository (like Maven's mvn install).

Why common options feel non-ideal in polyrepo setups

While Pkl's built-in options (like relative project imports) work great for monorepo setups, they become insufficient for local development in a polyrepo setup:

• Publishing releases per tweak: Pollutes release history, slow.
• Relative paths: Adds overhead of toggling between relative and remote package imports, is error-prone (easy to accidentally commit) and breaks CI/CD on compiler (dsl doesn't exist there).
• HTTP Rewrites / Proxies: Adds unnecessary local setup overhead.

[HT154]

Hi there!

The closest you get to mvn install with Pkl is writing the built package zip directly to Pkl's package cache (currently ~/.pkl/cache by default). You can customize the path to this cache in a PklProject file, and you can even do so conditionally, e.g. based on an environment variable (read?("env:BLAH")).

Another approach is influencing a dependency itself using a similar technique to swap in a local import without having to directly edit PklProject directly:

amends "pkl:Project"

dependencies {
  ["dsl"] {
    uri = "package://pkg.pkl-lang.org/github.com/org/dsl@1.0.0-SNAPSHOT"
  }
} {
  when (read?("env:LOCAL_DSL") != null) {
    ["dsl"] = import(".../dsl/PklProject")
  }
}

This will require a pkl project resolve when changing.

[nwsepl]

Thanks for the quick response! I figured we could manually (via a build script) copy the built package directly into the cache dir, but are there any plans for supporting this natively (e.g. via cli)?

[HT154]

Actually doing this is simple enough, so I spiked adding this feature: #1795