SMOD: Stop rebuilding. Start Building

I Built SMOD: A Package Manager for Reusable Solana Programs

If you've built more than one Solana program, you've probably written the same logic more than once.

Payments, escrow, common instructions, account validation, and other building blocks often end up copied between projects. It works, but maintaining and reusing that code isn't always straightforward.

I wanted to explore a better approach, so I built SMOD.

🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/MLYTC1/smod

What is SMOD?

SMOD is a CLI package manager for reusable Solana on-chain modules.

Think of Cargo for Rust or npm for JavaScript, but designed around reusable Solana program modules.

The idea is simple: instead of repeatedly copying common logic between projects, developers should be able to manage reusable modules as dependencies.

SMOD currently supports:

• Project initialization — create a project with smod init.
• Dependency management — track modules in a human-readable smod.toml manifest.
• Lockfiles — use smod.lock to track resolved dependencies.
• Dependency updates — update installed dependencies with smod update.
• Local module registry — work with locally stored module packages and metadata.

The CLI is implemented and working. The registry is currently local, so I'm not claiming that SMOD already has a decentralized, production-ready package ecosystem. That's part of the direction I'd like to explore next.

Why build this?

Solana developers have excellent tools for building programs, but I think there's room to improve how reusable on-chain code is packaged, distributed, and maintained.

I want SMOD to make common modules easier to reuse and give the ecosystem a more standardized way to manage them.

Longer term, I'm interested in exploring a decentralized registry, potentially using IPFS for module storage and Solana accounts for registry metadata.

That's the vision. Right now, I'm focused on making the core tool useful first.

Want to try it?

I'd really appreciate feedback from Solana developers, Rust developers, and anyone interested in developer infrastructure.

Check out the repository, follow the setup guide, and try SMOD in a test project:

👉 Explore SMOD on GitHub

If you find it useful, consider giving the repository a ⭐. It helps other developers discover the project and motivates me to keep improving it.

Even more valuable: tell me what doesn't work, what features are missing, or whether you'd actually use a package manager like this in your Solana workflow.

A few questions for the community:

• How do you currently share and reuse common Solana program logic across projects?
• Would you prefer a centralized registry, a decentralized registry, or a combination of both?
• What would SMOD need before you'd consider using it in a real project?

I'm building this independently and would love to hear what the community thinks.

Thanks for checking it out!