Poca

Run remote scripts locally.

This tool allows you to fetch scripts that are stored on a remote server and execute them on your local machine. To execute a script you need to specify the collection that the script is a part of and the name of the script. For example:

$ poca wordpress init

The above command will execute the init script from the wordpress collection.

Installation

Poca is written in Node.js so you need to have node installed first. Then you should use npm to install Poca globally.

$ npm install -g poca

Usage

Poca groups scripts into collections that are defined in your .poca config file (see the Configuration section below). Each collection defines a location where scripts can be downloaded from.

For example, if you have a collection called wordpress which contains a script called init, you can execute that script as follows:

$ poca wordpress init

You can also pass arguments to a script by placing them after the script's name:

$ poca mysql create-user joe "joes-password"

Configuration

Configuration details for poca are defined in your local .poca file that is located in your home directory. If this file does not exist you need to create it. This file should to be in the YAML format and at a minimum it needs to define the set of collections available. See the Collections section below for details on how to define collections.

Collections

Collections are defined in the collections section of your local .poca config file that should be located in your home directory. collections must be an array of objects where each object has the following properties:

• name: the name of the collection
• url: the base URL to use for fetching scripts.

The following is an example .poca file that defines two collections: example and mysql.

---
collections:
  - name: example
    url: https://github.com/gawhelan/poca-scripts/raw/master/example/
  - name: mysql
    url: https://github.com/gawhelan/poca-scripts/raw/master/mysql/

With the above configuration file you can execute the following command:

$ poca example python

The above command will combine the collection's url property with the script name python and try to fetch the file located at the url https://github.com/gawhelan/poca-scripts/raw/master/example/python. If the file is successfully retrieved from the server, it is saved to a temporary location and then executed.

Scripts

Scripts are just normal executable files. They can be written in any scripting language but each file should begin with a shebang indicating what interpreter to use for executing the script. For example:

#!/usr/bin/env php
<?php
echo "This is a PHP script.";

or:

#!/usr/bin/env node
console.log('This is a node script.');

or:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
echo "This is a Bash script."

The required interpreter needs to already be installed on your local machine in order for the script to be executed successfully.

Arguments

Any arguments that appear after the script name are passed as arguments to the script when it is executed. So for example:

$ poca example say-hello Joe

Will fetch the say-hello script from the example collection and execute it, passing the value Joe as the first argument to the script.

Environment Variables

When a script is executed it inherits all of the environment variables that poca has access to. Two additional environment variables are also available to the script:

• POCA_COLLECTION: the name of the collection that the script is contained in.
• POCA_SCRIPT: the name of the script being executed.

Windows Support

Poca supports Windows but requires a Unix-like environment such as MSYS to be installed.