This will make it much easier for everyone to search for dependencies, as well as simply browse this community’s truly impressive body of work. You can read more about the Library in this blogpost!
We’ve included many dependencies submitted to our Show & Tell section, but we surely missed some. If there’s a dependency you made that’s not in the Library and you would like it to be, feel free to reach out! You can post here or send us an email. Either way, we’ll fix that in no time.
We owe this all to your hard work making seriously cool things with Anvil, and we would be remiss not to extend our warmest thanks. So, thank you, and happy browsing
The bitmap shown in the announcement post displays cool unique background images for each dependency, very cool! However, the actual library page doesn’t (cheater!).
Would it make sense to either:
Use the first bitmap in the repo’s README as the default preview, or
Establish a naming convention that enables automatic detection, such as library_background.png and library_icon.png placed in the root directory?
(By the way, I love the Anvil Testing icon!)
It might also be helpful to publish a short “How to Submit a Dependency” guide for the library, with a checklist like:
Add a README.md
Include an MIT license
The read me should include an Anvil clone link to the dependency
Place library_background.png and library_icon.png in the root folder
Also: how does the public third-party dependency token system actually work?
Does it require manual intervention from the Anvil team to make a dependency available, or is it handled automatically once certain conditions are met (e.g., repo visibility, token setup, metadata)?
Integrate into Editor - Make the dependency library a part of the Anvil Editor itself. So I can directly add dependencies to my Anvil app from the library
Allow direct submissions - Instead of sending an email, allow users to directly submit their dependencies from the library itself. Maybe include a review process if needed (can take help from community moderators if required)
But this is a really cool start to upgrading the dependency system for Anvil
I will attempt to answer everyone in a single post
We’ve made a couple of quick updates to the Dependency Library! We swapped the “+” icon for a more suitable menu icon and we made other tiny quality of life changes.
Some dependencies that are in the forums (and on this very handy wiki) are indeed not showcased in the Dependency Library just yet. We’ve reached out to their creators and are waiting for them to give us their consent to include their apps, as well as to ensure their apps meet our criteria, which I will get into right now.
For an app to be on the Dependency Library, we require them to be put on GitHub with an MIT license. We encourage creators to open source their dependencies, which ensures nobody is at legal risk for putting their apps out there for other Anvil users to use, and GitHub is the simplest way to do so.
Regarding the dependency card art… you got us! We made the ones featured in the blogpost screenshot more as a proof of concept than anything else. Rest assured, we won’t let the Dependency Library remain a sea of gray for long.
You are indeed more than welcome to post suggestions in the Feature Requests section of the forums (no worries @divyeshlakhotia, I took note of your very good suggestions!). We will keep track of suggestions made there and include them in our future plans.
Thank you all for your engagement so far, and stay tuned for future updates!
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