Drone

The missing library manager for Android Developers

Summary

⚡? Blazing fast way to add libraries
🎉 No need to search the web for that library
🚀 Intuitive, easy-to-learn tool
💎 Add multiple dependencies with a one liner
✌? Automated dependency and package management
🔨 Automatic import custom urls (e.g. jitpack)

Usage

Simple usage:

drone add <library> <module>

Single library

drone add picasso app

Multiple

drone add picasso retrofit rxjava gson app

Usage
  $ drone <command> <params>
  $ drone install

 # Downloads the packages
 $ drone test <library>

# Tests the library by fetching its version
 $ drone add <library> <module>

 # Adds a dependency to a module
 $ drone remove <library> <module>

 # Removes the dependency from a module
 $ drone info <library>

# Retrieves the info for this package
 $ drone update

  # Get the latest packages
 $ drone list

 # List all of the packages
 $ drone stats

# Get some stats regarding the hive
 $ drone hive

 # Opens the hive url
 $ drone open <library>

# Opens the library's homepage
 $ drone new

  # Creates a new one if it's not in the server yet
 $ drone search <library>

 # Searches for the 'library' in the hive
Examples
  $ drone install

 # Downloads the packages
 $ drone info picasso

  # Shows the info for square/picasso
 $ drone add square/retrofit app

# Adds retrofit to the 'app' module
  $ drone add retrofit app

 # Adds retrofit to the 'app' module
  $ drone rm square/retrofit app

 # removes retrofit from the 'app' module
  $ drone open google/gson

 # Opens GSONs homepage
 $ drone new

  # takes you through the creation wizard
 $ drone search rxjava

 # Searches the hive for 'rxjava'
 $ drone test picasso

  # Tests the library by fetching its version

Install

npm install -g drone

What is it?

As an android developer I was jealous of the node.js community for their fast and reliable dependency managers, it's so easy to write yarn add <library> and a library is imported into the project... So I made drone for android!

If you think about it there are like 50 libraries that are used in 95% of the apps (retrofit, rxjava, gson, picasso, roboletric, recyclerview-v7, etc.)

I made this because every time I want to add (lets say) butterknife I need to

google butterknife
go to the readme
find the lines to copy
notice that butterknife has 2 dependencies
copy and paste in my gradle file
OPTIONAL if it was not in jcenter, go to the main build gradle and put the custom URL

OR...

drone add butterknife

and everything will be done for you automatically

Where are the libraries?

Instead of maintaining a server with all the possible libraries I'm going with a brew approach, the community will create a library once and it will be available to everyone else forever in the hive!

$ drone new

follow the wizard to generate the <library>.json file then open the pull request in the hive with this format:

hive/ <creator/library>.json

If you look closely, when you type square/retrofit, drone will autofill everything for you, and even if it takes a few hours for the pull request to be accepted you'll be able to do drone add square/retrofit because the drone new task will add it to your personal server/folder.