zeugwerk/twinpack

Twinpack is a package manager for TwinCAT libraries with integration into the TwinCAT IDE. It enables the TwinCAT community to share their libraries and simplifies the continous integration of third-party components into TwinCAT projects.

Twinpack

The Twinpack Package Manager is a powerful and user-friendly package management tool for TwinCAT libraries. It is designed to empower the TwinCAT community by enabling sharing and distribution of libraries. It acts as a versatile platform similarly to NuGet (but with a PLC touch), allowing users to efficiently manage and deploy their custom-built modules.

Quicklinks

• Download latest Release
• Twinpack-Registry for automatic publishing of your library on Twinpack by "pulling" them from your GitHub releases
• Registration, only needed to "push" package, i.e. if you want to publish packages manually or with CI
  • Password reset (optional)
• Contact us

Installation

To use the Twinpack Package Manager, follow these steps:

1. Download the latest installer.
2. Select the IDEs, which Twinpack should be installed for.
3. Click on "Install".
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation.

Using a Package

To install a package, follow these steps:

1. Open a TwinCAT solution and navigate to a PLC.
2. Right click the References item of your PLC
3. Click 'Twinpack Catalog...'
4. Browse or search for the desired package.
5. Click on the package to view details.
6. Click on the "Add" button to install this package and add it to the referenced libraries.
7. Wait for the installation process to complete. If you are installing packages from a contributor for the first time and these packages come with a license you will be asked to confirm their license agreement in order to advance.
8. Twinpack automatically installs the package, including all depending libraries, on your System and adds it as a reference to your PLC.
9. Follow the library documentation or instructions to incorporate its functionality into your project.

Share a Package ...

There are multiple ways to publish a package on Twinpack and you can chose how you want to publish your packages depending on how you want to create releases.

with the Twinpack Registry

The most straight forward way to publish a package, which you release on GitHub anyway, is to use the Twinpack Registry.

• Create a Pull Request in which you add your repository to the repositories.txt file, similarily to this commit.
• No other action is needed, there is a workflow in the twinpack-registry repository, which automatically uploads all libraries found in the latest release for all repositories on this list.

with a GitHub workflow

If you have a CI/CD environment it can be benefical to you to upload your package by using the Twinpack Commandline interface (see the TwinpackCli project in Twinpack). For GitHub, we tried to streamline this process as much as possible by providing a GitHub action, which will do this for you, see twinpack-action for details.

Note, if you don't have your own CI/CD environment, this action can be used to implement CI/CD on the Zeugwerk CI/CD environment, unlike Twinpack we can only provide this environment free of charge in a limited amount (at the moment 30 buildactions / month)

manually in your IDE

This is the most straight forward way to publish a package if you want to publish your library directly from your IDE

1. Open a TwinCAT solution and navigate to the PLC library you want to share with the community.
2. Right click the PLC item and click 'Twinpack' -> 'Publish ...'
3. In the dialog, which opens, fill in the information describing your package.
   • Distributor (mandatory): The name you enter here will be exclusively associated with your Twinpack Account, and it will serve as a unique identifier for all your upcoming packages.
   • Version (mandatory): This is the initial version of your package. Once you publish your package for the first time, you have the flexibility to release newer versions in the future.
   • Other fields are optional
4. Click publish to make Twinpack
   • Check all objects of your library
   • Upload the library as a package to the Twinpack server making it available for the community

After the initial upload of your library as a package, you may publish newer versions of your library or you can also modify the current version by right clicking on the PLC item and then on 'Twinpack' -> 'Modify...'. Users of Twinpack will be notified whenever a newer version is available in the Twinpack Catalog.

Further information

🌟 Make sure to follow this project by leaving a star or simply follow us, to always get notified if a newer version of Twinpack is released.

📺 We have also created a short introductionary video on how to install and use Twinpack (more to come):

• Share TwinCAT libraries with Twinpack

twinpack's Issues

every time when twinpack gets opened, the repository list gets entries added instead of clean -> reload

When Twinpack-catalog gets opened the first time, there is one entry shown

now close twinpack catalog and open again (without closing shell), did it three times in the following picture

installed entry on a library does not show if a library is installed

if one installed a library, closes twinpack catalog and opens it again, installed is empty

or should this show referenced?

Edit:
it seems like creator overwrites the config.json file

Edit:
it looks like that the installed entry does not see that this library version is allready installed in twincat? is it supposed to do so?

Remove released flag in favor of a configuration (Debug, Release, …) parameter

View installed / used packages

Support License Tmc Files

Dialog to upload packages

Create initial config.json if none exists

Twinpack and Creator together not working

Use fa

https://github.com/MartinTopfstedt/FontAwesome5

Implement dependencies

Package or PackageVersion needs a Vendor field

Auto select installed version

create an entry with "referenced version" to quickly see which version is referenced in the project

i assume, installed shows all installed version of a library, and available a list with all available versions of a library

maybe a referenced entry would be nice to quickly see which version is referenced in the project

Panel to configure restricted options (entitlements, branches, targets, configurations, compiled, tmc file)

Defaults and not changeable for the community MVP

• No entitlements
• No branches
• General Twincat Target (= TC3.1)
• Release
• Only .library
• No license tmc file

Implement branch visibility restriction

Install package

Split post package into post package and post package-version

Move code from creator to twinpack repo

Fix icon loading, add default icon

Create Installer

Dialog for authentication

Add more package meta data

• Icon
• Display Name
• Project URL

View package version detail

Support for auxiliary files

Upload files and let the user specify to destination target. This can be used to

• upload library specific templates
• Device description files
• etc

To handle this use case we archive all files and upload the archive instead of a library file and add a designates files section to the config

remove dependencies entry if there arent any depencies

just an idea, if there arent any dependencies, this entry can be removed.

maybe create a different error message if login credentials are entered wrong

now there comes a message like this

where it only says in the headline that the login failed and maybe credentials are wrong.
we could write "login failed - wrong credentials" also in the text field

Use strong name assembly for twinpack.dll

Improve ux, add visual feedback to actions

Update package

Menu for Publish + Modify

Use Output panel for logging

fetching library information takes some time, maybe a loading screen would be nice

if one is clicking on a library on the left side in the list, twinpack is fetching the information and shows it on the right.
this takes some time and leaves the user without any information that it will take some time (its also depending on the speed of your internet line).

add a loading gif or something like this on the right half of the dialogue?

its also a strange behavior when changing from one library to the next that the name gets updated and the other information takes half a second longer till its updatet

Placeholder Resolution is not set correctly

Reduce clutter (don’t show branch names, configuration names, target names, if there are not multiple available for the logged in user)

library icons are only shown at the first time when opening twinpack catalog

when twinpack catalog gets opened the first time (after shell opening a project), it looks right

When i open the catalog a second time it looks like this (without icons)

Dialog for uploading package

Installed Packages are lost when installing packages from two different distributors

Use session cache to reduce api calls

Update Config.json if package added / updated

View updates of packages

Move branch selection into it’s own combobox, hide it if there is only 1 item

Implement pagination

Twinpack Update notification is always showing on the upper right corner

even if there is the newest version installed, this notification is always showing in the upper right corner

Check for updates of all used packages

Fetch more package versions when scrolling

Add disclaimer

Implement update mechanism

Implement uninstall

Dialog to visualize catalog

make an icon with a higher resolution to avoid seeing pixels of the icon