Resolv"ng package dependency fa"lures | Documentat"on 23/10/2025 10:39
Documentation Language: Swift
Adding dependencies to a Swift Resolving package dependency
Swift Package Mana… / /
package failures
Article
Resolving package dependency
failures
Understand dependency failure scenarios.
Overview
You define constraints for dependencies when you add them to your package, and
those constraints can not always be met.
Prior to running a build or test, or when you run swift package resolve, the package
manager walks through the dependencies in your package, and all their dependencies
recursively, to build a complete list. It then attempts to choose a version of each
dependency that fits within the constraints of your package, and any constraints
provided by your dependencies.
If all the dependencies are available and resolved, the versions are recorded locally in
the file Package.resolved. You can view these dependencies using the command
swift package show-dependencies, which provides a succint list of the entire set of
dependencies.
If the dependencies can’t be resolved, for example when the packages your package
depends on have conflicting constraints, the package manager returns an error,
describing the conflicting constraint:
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error: Dependencies could not be resolved because root depends on 'pkgb' 0.1.
'pkgb' 0.1.0 cannot be used because 'pkgb' 0.1.0 depends on 'pkga' 0.3.0 and
Rework your dependencies, or update a package you want to depend upon, to resolve
any conflicting constraints.
Failure Scenarios
There are a variety of scenarios that may occur, including:
Inappropriate Versioning
A package may specify an inappropriate version for a release. For example, a
version is tagged 1.2.3, but introduces extensive, breaking API changes that
should be reflected by a major version bump to 2.0.0.
Incompatible Major Version Requirements
A package may have dependencies with incompatible version requirements for
the same package. For example, if Foo depends on Baz at version ~>1.0 and
Bar depends on Baz at version ~>2.0, then there is no one version of Baz that
can satisfy both requirements. This situation often arises when a dependency
shared by many packages updates to a new major version, and it takes a long
time for all of those packages to update their dependency.
Incompatible Minor or Update Version Requirements
A package may have dependencies that are specified too strictly, such that
version requirements are incompatible for different minor or update versions. For
example, if Foo depends on Baz at version ==2.0.1 and Bar depends on Baz at
version ==2.0.2, once again, there is no one version of Baz that can satisfy both
requirements. This is often the result of a regression introduced in a patch release
of a dependency, which causes a package to lock that dependency to a particular
version.
Namespace Collision
A package may have two or more dependencies that have the same name. For
example, a Person package depends on an Addressable package that defines
a protocol for assigning a mailing address to a person, as well as an
Addressable package that defines a protocol for speaking formally to another
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person.
Broken Software
A package may have a dependency with an outstanding bug that is impacting
usability, security, or performance. This may simply be a matter of timeliness on
the part of the package maintainers, or a disagreement about their expectations
for the package.
Global State Conflict
A package may have two or more dependencies that presume to have exclusive
access to the same global state. For example, one package may not be able to
accommodate another package writing to a particular file path while reading from
that same file path.
Package Becomes Unavailable
A package may have a dependency on a package that becomes unavailable. This
may be caused by the source URL becoming inaccessible, or maintainers deleting
a published version.
See Also
Resolving and updating dependencies
Coordinate and constrain dependencies for your package.
Provide configurable packages using traits.
Define one or more traits to offer default and configurable features for a package.
Adding a dependency on a system library.
Define the location for the library and provide module map to expose C headers
to Swift.
Swift package example that uses system library dependency with pkg-config
Create an Command-line executable package that uses libgit2 as a system
library dependency.
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Editing a remote dependency used in a Swift package
Temporarily switch a remote dependency to local in order to edit the dependency.
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