Projects with multi file support

In modern software development it is not uncommon that you use more than 1 package manager for a software project. Maybe you are using Ruby for the backend and JavaScript for the front end. In that case you would use 2 package managers. Bundler/Rubygems for the backend and maybe bower for the front end. You would have at last 3 files for describing your dependencies. A Gemfile and a Gemfile.lock for your backend and a bower.json file for your front end.

Up to now a project on VersionEye was always a representation of 1 single file. For example the Gemfile. So if you wanted to monitor all 3 files you had to have 3 projects on VersionEye. Now a project on VersionEye can have multiple files!

If you click on a Gemfile in our GitHub integration, VersionEye will check if there is a corresponding Gemfile.lock in the same directory. If so, it will parse that Gemfile.lock as well and create a new project with 2 files.

In the dependency tab, the corresponding files are displayed above the dependency table. In this example the Gemfile is selected and we see the dependencies of the Gemfile. By clicking on the Gemfile.lock we can switch to the dependencies of the Gemfile.lock. It’s all in the same project view.

The overall numbers in the head of the page are summed up from all files in the project. That means over the 2 files there are 58 unique dependencies and 33 of them are out-dated. Also the dependency badge is summed up over all files. The dependency badge only turns green if ALL dependencies in ALL files are up-to-date.

But that’s not all. How do we get the bower.json file into this project? Let’s assume the bower.json file is already a seperate project on VersionEye. Now we can merge projects into each other. This is how it works. Let’s navigate to the desired project we would like to merge into our Ruby project. Navigate to the “settings” tab. Here there is a new input field which looks like this:

Here we can pick a “parent” project to merge in. By clicking on the merge button the current project will be merged as subproject into the selected project.

Now we have a project with 3 files. Gemfile, Gemfile.lock and a bower.json file. The overall numbers are updated. Overall 3 files we have 59 dependencies and 33 are out-dated.

Under the file names there is a link “unmerge bower.json”. By clicking on that link the bower.json can be unmerged from this project. That means it will be removed from this project and be again a seperate project.

Pretty cool! Right? This is just the first step. In the next update we will bring this feature to the API and to the plugins as well 😉

Let us know what you think about this feature, either here in the comments or on Twitter.