Canton Daml Packaging

Overview

A Daml package compiles to a DAR (Daml Archive) — the deployable artifact, analogous to a Java JAR. You build with dpm build, deploy DARs to a ledger, and depend on other DARs to compose across projects.

Build → DAR

dpm build                 # → .daml/dist/<name>-<version>.dar
dpm build -o assets.dar   # custom output path
dpm build --all           # all packages in a multi-package project

A DAR is just a ZIP. It contains:

• *.dalf files — the compiled package and all its dependencies, in Daml-LF (Daml's intermediate language, a binary protobuf; the Daml Engine runs Daml-LF like the JVM runs bytecode).
• the original .daml source plus *.hi/*.hie files
• meta-inf/config

Inspect with dpm damlc inspect-dar assets.dar (add --json for machine-readable; main_package_id is your package hash).