shards

Shards is a command-line tool used in software development. It is primarily designed for managing dependencies in projects written in the Crystal programming language. Shards acts as a package manager by allowing users to declare and manage the dependencies of their Crystal projects. Projects that use Shards have a shard.yml file, which specifies the dependencies and their versions. Shards utilizes a lock file, shard.lock, to ensure consistent and reproducible builds. When a project is first initialized, Shards downloads and fetches the required dependencies from various sources, including Git repositories. It provides commands for installing, updating, and resolving dependencies. Shards supports semantic versioning, allowing users to define ranges or specific versions for their dependencies. It has features like parallel installation and caching, which helps to speed up the process of dependency resolution and compilation. Overall, Shards simplifies dependency management in Crystal projects and ensures that the necessary libraries are readily available for development and deployment.