Celer

A lightweight, non-intrusive, delivery-oriented C/C++ package management tool for projects centered on CMake

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✨ Why Celer?

Celer is designed to lower the barrier to hosting, handoff, and reuse in C/C++ projects by handling the complexity of build, compile, and install steps. At the same time, it separates dependency management and build environments from business code. This separation of concerns makes project boundaries clearer and engineering workflows easier to manage.

In real C/C++ projects, the common pain points usually look like these:

• 🎯 High integration cost: existing projects often depend on specific build conventions, so taking over a project means touching code and build scripts.
• 🚀 Complex cross-compilation environments: compilers, sysroots, ABIs, environment variables, and dependency sources are scattered, so switching platforms and reproducing environments is expensive.
• 📦 Built artifacts are hard to reuse: repeated builds are common, outputs vary across machines and stages, and environment drift is easy to introduce.
• 🔧 Third-party libraries use many build tools: CMake, Makefiles, Meson, B2, and QMake all need different handling.
• 🏢 Projects contaminate each other: dependency versions, macros, and environment variables leak globally and create conflicts.
• 🔗 Team collaboration and delivery are difficult: environments are tightly bound to individual machines, making handoff, collaboration, and CI rollout expensive.

🚀 Quick Start

# 1. Install Celer (or download a prebuilt package from releases)
git clone https://github.com/celer-pkg/celer.git
cd celer && go build

# 2. Initialize with a configuration repository
celer init --url=https://github.com/celer-pkg/test-conf.git

# 3. Configure your platform and project
celer configure --platform=x86_64-linux-ubuntu-22.04-gcc-11.5.0
celer configure --project=project_test_01

# 4. Test clone, build and install a library.
celer install glog@0.6.0

📖 Full Quick Start Guide

💡 How It Works

Celer generates a toolchain_file.cmake based on your platform and project configuration. That file connects your project to predefined toolchains, dependencies, environment variables, and build settings.

That means:

• your project can keep its existing CMake structure;
• dependencies and platform configuration are managed externally in a unified way;
• once generated, the toolchain file can be reused independently for team collaboration, CI/CD, and issue reproduction.

🌟 Core Capabilities

🆚 Where Celer Differs from Other C++ Package Managers

If your only need is “how do I fetch an open-source library”, Conan, vcpkg, and XMake already provide mature solutions.

Celer is stronger where delivery efficiency and consistency in complex engineering environments matter more:

In one sentence:

Celer focuses on delivery efficiency, cross-compilation, and team collaboration—not on generic ecosystem size.

📖 Learn more about the problems Celer is built to solve

📚 Documentation

Getting Started: - Quick Start Guide - Get started in 5 minutes - Create a New Platform - Define custom cross-compilation environments - Create a New Project - Configure project-level settings - Add a New Port - Host and manage your own libraries

Advanced Topics: - Generate CMake Configs - Auto-generate configuration for prebuilt binaries - PkgCache Shared Cache and NFS Permissions - Share package caches across teams with NFS and append-only directory protection - Cache Build Artifacts - Reuse built artifacts to reduce repeated integration cost - Cache Source Repositories - Reuse source trees through repo cache when upstream access is unstable - Cache Build Tools - Speed up and stabilize the compilation environment by caching compilation tools - Support CCache - Speed up repeated compilation by reusing compiler outputs - Expression Variables - Review the dynamic variables available in TOML configuration - Detect Version Conflicts and Circular Dependencies - Catch invalid dependency relationships before builds start - CUDA Auto Detection - Integrate CUDA toolchains for GPU-oriented projects - Export Snapshots - Export a reproducible workspace snapshot after deployment

📋 Commands

🤝 Contributing

Celer is an open-source project built for community collaboration. Contributions are welcome in:

• celer - the core package manager implementation
• ports - port definitions and build configurations

If you want to add features, improve documentation, or contribute new port definitions, we would be glad to have your help.

📄 License

This project is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

Third-party libraries in the ports repository remain under their original licenses.

Built for complex C/C++ engineering delivery

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