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Show HN: I Built a Kotlin Package Manager (KPM)

BenMorrisRains Friday, February 20, 2026

Disclaimer: Still in alpha. Also vibe coded, so... you've been warned.

I'm not really sure where this is going or if it needs to go anywhere, but as someone who lives in Kotlin based projects almost all day, I always envied web-devs with their npm's and bun's. Or Python devs with their pips.

Using those tools makes spinning up a project or adding dependencies seem so frictionless. No Google searches for every dependency path to copy/paste into Gradle.

That's where this idea came from for kpm. The job is basically the same. Run a simple command to scaffold an Android or Kotlin project and then another simple command to add a dependency. That's the idea anyways.

I had started out writing this by hand a few years ago and it went off the rails somewhere and I started over using Claude last year. Just recently picked it back up a bit and I think it's in a good enough spot right now to see if anyone is interested in something like this. AI is really good at scripting projects.

There's no real magic here beyond a lot of code to generate Gradle files and mutate them. There's some things I'm not sure about like the global config. I don't even know if that is useful and it certainly will mess things up if you use it in an already set up project because it's currently overwriting everything, so yeah, be careful.

I am working on (or AI is I guess) generating CMP/KMP projects which would be really nice.

Obviously this will never be as smooth as a bun or pip but it gives a familiar-ish experience.

If you are an Android dev, to get started: kpm new MyApp --android --compose kpm add <Library here> will add a dependency

Curious and nervous to hear what people think. Thank you!

Summary
The article discusses the development of a Kotlin-based package manager, which aims to simplify the management of Kotlin dependencies and project configurations across different platforms and environments.
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