Install wally with Homebrew, Nix, winget

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• wally

Project history

Wally's first public GitHub release, v0.1.0, was published on August 3, 2021 and explicitly introduced it as a new package manager for Roblox in early alpha form. Later 2021 releases quickly added a public website, public authentication, development dependencies, and improvements to dependency resolution and package links.

The project is split between a `wally` command-line tool and registry services. The README describes the official registry as a Git repository containing the package index plus a registry API for downloading, searching, and publishing package contents, an architecture directly inspired by Cargo and crates.io.

By v0.3.2 in June 2023, the release notes called link generation and dev dependencies stable, reported much faster package downloads through parallelized installation, and improved lockfiles. The repository has not followed a rapid stable-release cadence since then, but the public index and package website continue to represent the production package ecosystem.

Adoption history

Wally's adoption is tied to the professionalization of Roblox development outside Roblox Studio. Rojo's documentation lists Wally alongside tools such as Selene, StyLua, and Moonwave as part of the file-based Roblox workflow, and Uplift Games presents Wally with Rojo as part of its open source tooling for scalable, collaborative Roblox projects.

The registry includes widely used Roblox packages such as Cmdr, Roact, Promise, TestEZ, Knit, Janitor, and RbxUtil-family packages. Third-party library documentation commonly instructs developers to add dependencies to `wally.toml`, run `wally install`, and sync the generated Packages folder through Rojo.

How it is used

A typical project runs `wally init`, edits `wally.toml` to declare package metadata and dependencies, runs `wally install`, and commits the resulting lockfile so the team resolves the same package versions. The generated Packages folder is then mapped into Roblox services such as ReplicatedStorage through Rojo.

Package authors use Wally to publish reusable Luau modules to a scoped registry, while teams use it to avoid manually vendoring and updating common libraries. Its package-nerd role is to bring standard package-manager discipline to an ecosystem that historically relied on model files, copied modules, and ad hoc GitHub downloads.

Timeline

• 2021-08-03: v0.1.0 launched as the first public Wally release.
• 2021-10-01: v0.2.1 announced the public wally.run website.
• 2021-11-11 and 2021-11-12: v0.3.0 and v0.3.1 added and iterated on dev-dependency support.
• 2023-06-05: v0.3.2 stabilized link generation and dev dependencies and improved install performance.

Sources

• https://github.com/UpliftGames/wally
• https://github.com/UpliftGames/wally-index
• https://github.com/UpliftGames/wally/releases
• https://rojo.space/docs/v7/
• https://sleitnick.github.io/RbxUtil/docs/intro/
• https://wally.run/
• https://wally.run/policies
• https://www.uplift.games/open-source-software