The Swift Package Index logo.Swift Package Index

Launching Swift Package Collections


It's probably not news that this is a big week for Swift developers! On Monday, Apple kicked WWDC off by releasing the first beta of Xcode 13, including Swift 5.5. We've been following the release of the Swift Package Manager in Swift 5.5 closely as it implements package collections, a significant new feature.

What are package collections? JSON descriptions of Swift package metadata. What does the Swift Package Index have in droves? Metadata about Swift packages! As soon as we heard about the proposal, we knew we had to support it. For a comprehensive description of the feature, check out the post over on the official Swift blog.

We have big plans for package collections, but we wanted to ship something alongside this first beta release. We chose to implement author collections, a list of all packages from the index grouped by repository owner. For example, you can get a package collection containing all packages from Alamofire or all packages from Point-Free.

We expected this feature to roll out as part of the Swift Package Manager command-line tool, and it did. What we didn't expect was full support for package collections in Xcode 13! What a pleasant surprise that was. 😍

We've written up the details of how to access collections on the Swift Package Index, including how to add them to Xcode and use them from the command line. We'd love for you to check it out.

However, that wasn't the only surprise this week had in store for us! As we watched Nicole Jacque talk about What's new in Swift, we were amazed to see a screenshot of the Swift Package Index appear on the screen and hear Nicole start to talk about it. Remarkable!

The Swift Package Index site being presented in What's new in Swift at WWDC 2021

We're so happy that Apple sees what we've been working on here as important enough to mention in a WWDC session, and we'd like to thank everyone who was involved in that decision for including us. It's a great honour and one that we do not take lightly.


About this blog

The Swift Package Index is a search engine and metadata index for Swift packages. Our main goal is to help you make better decisions about the dependencies you include in your apps and projects. If you're new here, the best place to get started is by searching for packages.