Local folder or tarball paths

You can specify a dependency as any local folder or tarball that contains a package. This feature is helpful for local offline development and testing.

Note: If you want to reference a package on the local file system as a Git dependency, use the file://<url> format instead. Unity does not support directly referencing a locally-accessible Git repository with a file path. For more information on the file://<url> format, see Git dependencies.

This section describes how to use the project manifest to set up a local dependency. If you want to use the Package Manager window instead, follow the instructions on these pages:

• Installing a package from a local folder
• Installing a package from a local tarball file

The path reference always begins with the file: prefix, and uses forward slashes (/) for path separators.

Note: On Windows, you can also use backslashes (\), but only if you escape each one (for example, "file:..\\github\\my_package_folder" or "file:C:\\Users\\my_username\\github\\my_package_folder"). These paths are not as easy to read as the forward slashes, they are prone to typing errors, and you can’t use them anywhere but on a Windows machine. For these reasons, using forward slashes is preferable.

You can use either absolute paths, or paths that are relative to the project’s Packages folder (that is, the root folder of the project manifest). In other words, a path preceded with two dots (..) refers to the root of the project path, so that ../another_folder is a sibling of the Packages folder.

Tip: Relative paths with forward-slashes provide better portability across different machines and operating systems when tracking a project and packages in the same repository.

For Windows absolute paths, the drive letter and its colon (usually C:) follows the file: prefix but is otherwise identical to Linux or macOS paths.

Example of a relative path

After the file: prefix, the path is a standard relative path:

{
  "dependencies": {
    "my_package_a": "file:../github/my_package_folder",
    "my_package_b": "file:../Downloads/my_package_tarball.tgz"
  }
}

Example of an absolute path in Linux or macOS

After the file: prefix, the path is a standard POSIX path, starting with a forward slash /:

{
  "dependencies": {
    "my_package_a": "file:/Users/my_username/github/my_package_folder",
    "my_package_b": "file:/Users/my_username/Downloads/my_package_tarball.tgz"
  }
}

Example of an absolute path in Windows

Notice that the drive letter immediately follows the file: prefix:

{
  "dependencies": {
    "my_package_a": "file:C:/Users/my_username/github/my_package_folder",
    "my_package_b": "file:C:/Users/my_username/Downloads/my_package_tarball.tgz"
  }
}