Package Managers

Package managers are tools that provide managed support for your included libraries. These package managers may provide functionality that can be used in your production code, provide functionality externally to your application that helps test your code, or even provide tools you can use to make development easier but that is discarded from the eventual production code.

When implementing a package manager, a manifest is kept that keeps track of each of the libraries that have been imported into your project, as well as their version numbers. This way, if you were to remove all of the libraries from your project, you could easily reinstall the libraries that were used instantly. This is very useful when storing your application source code in a source repository such as GitHub, as you only need to store your own code. Any libraries you have used in the past can be easily installed by other developers in your team using the package manifest, ensuring your source...