quickly

Quickly setups dependent services and servers for local development

Inspired by Aviator.

Often your application requires other services to run. If you develop locally, starting a particular version of a service locally, or pointing at a remote can be complicated. Quickly solves this. Just write a local quickly.js file in each project that provides local service or needs other local services. Then start all other services needed by entering quickly. If there are multiple configurations, quickly will ask you.

Example

Imagine project A depends on the application B to be running. A could be a server and B could be an API. In the A's root folder create new file quickly.js

module.exports = {
  // this project provides service A
  A: {
    dependencies: {
      path: '../B',
      service: 'API' // which service to load from ../B/quickly.js
    },
    // service A starts 'npm run dev'
    exec: 'npm',
    args: 'run dev'
  }
};

Create another quickly.js file in the project B folder

// project B provides API service
module.exports = {
  API: [{
    exec: 'npm',
    args: 'run watch'
  }]
};

Lifecycle

When starting a project A using quickly command all dependent child processes will be started. When you kill the project A (using Command+C), all child processes will be killed too.

Choices

A quickly.js file can export multiple configurations / services. In this case the system will ask the user which service to ask. For example, if quickly.js has

module.exports = {
  test1: {
    exec: 'echo',
    args: 'running test 1'
  },
  test2: {
    exec: 'echo',
    args: 'running test 2'
  }
};

Then the shell will be

$ quickly 
quickly@0.1.4 - Quickly setup dependent services and servers for local development
quickly in "/Users/gleb/git/quickly/test/two-choices" undefined
loading /Users/gleb/git/quickly/test/two-choices/quickly.js
...
no dependencies to start
found multiple services "test1", "test2"
? Pick a service to start: (Use arrow keys)
❯ test1 
  test2
# picked second 
user chose test2
starting "test2" in "/Users/gleb/git/quickly/test/two-choices" command "echo running test 2"
...
test2: running test 2
service "test2" finished with code 0

Other projects can specify which service to start without prompting the service property

A: {
  dependencies: {
    path: '../two-choices',
    service: 'test2' // do not ask the user, just start test2
  },
  ...
}

For more configuration examples, browser the test folder.

Install

npm install -g quickly

In each project create quickly.js as shown in the example.

Small print

Author: Gleb Bahmutov © 2015 @bahmutov glebbahmutov.com glebbahmutov.com/blog

License: MIT - do anything with the code, but don't blame me if it does not work.

Spread the word: tweet, star on github, etc.

Support: if you find any problems with this module, email / tweet / open issue on Github