How forge install works internally

[18121A05L2]

Hi Everyone,

we all know that npm stores all the installed packages somewhere global in the system and whenever we install that same package in another repo it will just target that specific node module to the current repo so that there won't be no duplicate node module copy in our system and I want to know whether foundry install works that way or not, if not what measures do we need to take so that we can have that feature in foundry which will save space for us in our system

[zerosnacks]

Hi @18121A05L2

forge install uses git submodules under the hood

for every repo it will reclone the libraries, there is no shared cache

[18121A05L2]

Hi @zerosnacks , but having cache will reduce space in our systems

if you can see for each repo we have a dependency from forge-std and opezeppelin

consider i have 20-30 smart contract repos , having all the duplicated will take GB's of data

[zerosnacks]

Foundry also supports Soldeer, a native Solidity package manager that may be more clever with the way it is caching between projects.

https://github.com/mario-eth/soldeer

$ forge soldeer

Soldeer dependency manager

Usage: Native Solidity Package Manager, `run forge soldeer [COMMAND] --help` for more details

Commands:
  init       Convert a Foundry project to use Soldeer
  install    Install a dependency
  update     Update dependencies by reading the config file
  login      Log into the central repository to push packages
  push       Push a dependency to the repository
  uninstall  Uninstall a dependency
  version    Display the version of Soldeer
  help       Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
  -h, --help               Print help (see more with '--help')
  -j, --threads <THREADS>  Number of threads to use. Specifying 0 defaults to the number of logical cores [aliases: jobs]

Display options:
      --color <COLOR>  The color of the log messages [possible values: auto, always, never]
      --json           Format log messages as JSON
  -q, --quiet          Do not print log messages
  -v, --verbosity...   Verbosity level of the log messages.