What are libraries?

Find out more about the Crowdbotics libraries, and when to use them.

Libraries are installable open-source packages from the major public registries, including npm and pypi. These packages serve as the underlying basis for Crowdbotics modules and components.

We automatically crawl and download data about all packages on these repositories, covering nearly nearly 500,000 different open-source libraries. Because open-source registries may be added to by anyone, most open-source packages are noise, and only skilled developers know the correct package to use. For example, searching for “Django Oauth” yields dozens of possible Python packages that claim to provide Oauth functionality. The correct package is buried in the registry, Django-SAML2, so that only an experienced software engineer, or a Crowdbotics user on this page, would know how to find it.

The vision for this page is to automatically show the right package for any given problem, using data submitted by other users who have identified the appropriate package, so that other Crowdbotics users can find that package readily. If done correctly, we believe this workflow will allow us to accelerate the process of component creation.

The libraries page on the Crowdbotics App Dashboard allows users to find, install or remove any package to their app’s repo. When installing from this page, a pinned version of the package is installed into the repo’s requirements file (needs confirmation on what version it is).

On this page, users may also be able to configure other settings related to libraries, like turning on automatic updates for dependencies that are out of date using Dependabot.