vba-blocks

A package manager for VBA

Based heavily on the design of the much-lauded package manager for Rust, Cargo, vba-blocks aims to make building projects with VBA simple and powerful. vba-blocks consists of three parts:

1. vba-block.toml is the manifest for a project, allowing you to specify dependencies, references, and source files for building your project
2. The developer add-in gets your project up-and-going and helps you install and update dependencies and source files
3. The vba-blocks CLI helps with starting your project and publishing packages for others to use

Install

Windows

In powershell, run the following:

iwr https://vba-blocks.com/install.ps1 | iex

Mac

In terminal, run the following:

curl -fsSL https://vba-blocks.com/install.sh | sh

For more recent versions of Office for Mac, you will need to trust access to the VBA project object model for vba-blocks to work correctly:

vba-block.toml

The manifest format is based on Cargo’s Cargo.toml and is used to specify the dependencies, references, and source files for your package or project.

For reference, here’s what the vba-block.toml would look like for a relatively simple project like VBA-Dictionary:

[package]
name = "dictionary"
version = "1.4.1"
authors = ["Tim Hall <[email protected]>"]

[src]
Dictionary = "Dictionary.cls"

An example of using the dictionary package in your project:

[project]
name = "My Project"
version = "0.0.0"
authors = ["[email protected]"]

[src]
A = "A.bas"
B = "B.cls"
C = "C.frm"

[dependencies]
dictionary = "1.4.1"

For more details, see the Manifest Format

CLI

Usage: vba-blocks [command] [options]

Commands:
  - new     Create a new project / package in a new directory
  - init     Initialize a new project / package in the current directory
  - build    Build project from manifest
  - test     Run tests for built target
  - export   Export src from built target
  - run      Run macro in document / add-in

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