Testing Packages in xmake-repo

xmake-repo is the official package recipe repository. Each recipe is a packages/<a>/<name>/xmake.lua describing how to fetch, build, and install a library. The repo ships a test script at scripts/test.lua that drives a full install + test build of a recipe exactly like CI does.

Always run it from the xmake-repo checkout root.

The core command

xmake l scripts/test.lua -vD --shallow <package>

• xmake l — run a Lua script in the xmake environment.
• -v — verbose (show each sub-command).
• -D — diagnosis (full tracebacks on failure; essential when debugging a broken recipe).
• --shallow — only install the package you asked for, not its dependencies. Dependencies are pulled from the remote binary cache instead of rebuilt locally. This is the single most important flag for iterating quickly.
• <package> — the package name, e.g. fmt, zlib, boost.

Example — test the fmt recipe: