ghvolo

A command line tool that uses volo as a library to do searches and resolutions of github IDs for front end/browser-based web dependencies.

This shows how you could use volo's github awareness just for identifying code on github, without using volo's other features.

This may be useful if you like the idea of using github as a package registry, but did not want to use the volo client tool to pull down the code.

It also allows you to experiment with how different IDs would be resolved using github and its API for a registry.

These features of volo do not require or assume AMD or some other module format to work. It just operates on github, using owner/repo pairs for final resolution, and version tags to find the latest release.

Running ghvolo does not install anything, it just prints out JSON results.

Install

Install globally so that the bin command works in any directory.

npm install -g ghvolo

Usage

There are two commands that ghvolo understands:

search

Search github for a given repo name:

ghvolo search jquery

This will give the top five github search results for repos that are language=JavaScript. The first search result's owner/repo combination is used for the resolve command below.

resolve

Resolves a repo name to the owner/repo/latestVersionTag ID, along with info on a download URL. Understands package.json files that have a volo or browser section, and will fall back to volojs/repos for shim config for any owner/repo pairs that are in volojs/repos:

ghvolo resolve jquery

Raw JSON output

By default, ghvolo uses prettyjson to show the JSON output. However, if you are more comfortable reading the raw JSON, pass -j:

ghvolo -j search jquery
ghvolo -j resolve jquery

Sample commands to try

ghvolo resolve bootstrap#js/bootstrap-alert.js

Resolves 'bootstrap', and give an url for the latest tag version, picking out just the js/bootstrap-alert.js file within that tagged archive.

ghvolo resolve backbone

Resolves backbone. documentcloude/backbone has a shim config in volojs/repos, so volo dependencies are listed in the packageInfo section, and since the volojs/repos shim has a volo.url section, a direct download link for backbone.js is used for the download URL.

ghvolo resolve underscore

Resolves to documentcloud/underscore. underscore does not have a shimmed package.json for a simple one file JS download url, so the download URL is a zip file for the latest release version.

ghvolo resolve html5boilerplate

Resolves to h5bp/html5-boilerplate and gives a zipball URL for the latest version tag release.