It recently came to my attention that trying to import packages into Google Colab for Swift is extraordinarily difficult.

When looking around on the internet on ways to do this, 2 links came up. One link points to a GitHub gist that shows you how to import packages in a long, tedious way, and the other points to a two-year-old forum that is 20+ responses long. Yet, neither gives a general, easy to do command that rivals Colab’s Python pip install.

In order to remedy this, I just spent the last 3 hours figuring out how to import packages into colab with a one liner.

Turns out all you need to do is type in:

%install '.package(url: "{GITHUB URL}", from: "{GITHUB REPO VERSION}")' {PACKAGE NAME}

Where you would replace the {INSERTS} with the proper information.

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An example would be:

%install '.package(url: "https://github.com/dankogai/swift-complex", from: "5.0.0")' Complex

This installs the Complex package for Swift (because the built-in one is utter 💩). The output looks something along the lines of:

Installing packages: .package(url: "https://github.com/dankogai/swift-complex", from: "5.0.0")

Complex With SwiftPM flags: [] 
Working in: /tmp/tmpmc6wisrl/swift-install 
Fetching https://github.com/dankogai/swift-complex 
Cloning https://github.com/dankogai/swift-complex 
Resolving https://github.com/dankogai/swift-complex at 5.0.0 [1/7] 
Compiling Complex GaussianInt.swift [2/7] 
Compiling Complex Complex.swift [3/7] 
Compiling Complex FloatingPointMath.swift [4/8] 
Merging module Complex [5/8] 
Wrapping AST for Complex for debugging [6/8] 
Linking libComplex.so [7/9] 
Compiling jupyterInstalledPackages jupyterInstalledPackages.swift [8/10] 
Merging module jupyterInstalledPackages [9/10] 
Wrapping AST for jupyterInstalledPackages for debugging [10/10] 
Linking libjupyterInstalledPackages.so [10/10] 
Linking libjupyterInstalledPackages.so 

* Build Completed! 
Initializing Swift... 
Installation complete!

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As you can see, this one command both installs and automatically builds the package – essentially the equivalent of pip install!

Now go out and write some Swifty code!

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Quick note: When you start your Colab notebook, the first line you run must be the package install command. I have no idea why, but Colab forces you to do this first