Introducing WAPM global package installs

Two weeks ago we released the first version of WAPM (the WebAssembly Package Manager) and since then we got a lot of insight and traction from the community.

One of the features people asked about the most, both on Hacker News and on our internal forums was to be able to install and use packages globally… what a great idea!

So we worked to make it possible in the latest version of Wasmer:

wapm install -g lua  # The -g flag indicates a global install

And… you can run lua anywhere!

wapm run lua

However …could we go one step further?

Wouldn’t be great if we can auto-generate the commands as scripts, and append it to the $PATH so the commands can be used more easily?

No sooner said than done…

New wapm 0.2.0 features

Apart from supporting global installs in wapm, we also added a lot of new features:

• wapm list outputs the list of installed packages
• Now you can uninstall a package by doing wapm uninstall PACKAGE_NAME
• Get the bin directory for wapm commands using wapm bin
• Install specific versions with wapm install lua@0.1.0

You can check the full list of changes here.

🎉 Recently Published Packages

With this release, we are also announcing three new packages available on wapm:

JavascriptCore

We got the JavaScript interpreter that is embedded in Safari, compiled to WebAssembly (thanks to the great work of Ming on JSC.js).

Install it with:

wapm install -g jsc

OptiPNG

OptiPNG is a PNG optimizer that recompresses image files to a smaller size, without losing any information.

Install it with:

wapm install -g optipng

pngquant

pngquant is a lossy PNG compressor that can reduce the size of your .png files up to 70%.

Install it with:

wapm install -g pngquant

We can’t wait to see what you build with us!