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Getting Started With Haxelib

Haxelib is the library manager that comes with any Haxe distribution. Connected to a central repository, it allows submitting and retrieving libraries and has multiple features beyond that. Available libraries can be found at http://lib.haxe.org.

A basic Haxe library is a collection of .hx files. That is, libraries are distributed by source code by default, making it easy to inspect and modify their behavior. Each library is identified by a unique name, which is utilized when telling the Haxe Compiler which libraries to use for a given compilation.

Using with Haxe

Any installed Haxe library can be made available to the compiler through the --library <library-name> (or -L <library-name>) argument. This is very similiar to the --class-path <path> argument, but expects a library name instead of a directory path. These commands are explained thoroughly in Compiler Usage.

For our exemplary usage we chose a very simple Haxe library called "random". It provides a set of static convenience methods to achieve various random effects, such as picking a random element from an array.

class Main {
  static public function main() {
    var elt = Random.fromArray([1, 2, 3]);
    trace(elt);
  }
}

Compiling this without any --library argument causes an error message along the lines of Unknown identifier : Random. This shows that installed Haxe libraries are not available to the compiler by default unless they are explicitly added. A working command line for above program is haxe --library random --main Main --interp.

If the compiler emits an error Error: Library random is not installed : run 'haxelib install random' the library has to be installed via the haxelib command first. As the error message suggests, this is achieved through haxelib install random. We will learn more about the haxelib command in Using Haxelib.