recompile

"recompile" is an auto-recompiler for command-line node scripts.

For example, if you're writing a CLI tool in coffee-script, it may be convenient for it to recompile and restart itself if the source code changes. You can do this by starting your script with:

recompile = require "recompile"
 
recompile.check "./src", "./lib", ->
  # your actual code here

The check function is:

check(sourceFolder, targetFolder, [options], callback)

It deep-compares the two folders, using a transform function to build target filenames from source filenames, and if any file in the target folder is newer than its corresponding file in the source folder, it executes a recompile command (using child_process.spawn) and then re-spawns node with its original command-line arguments, to try again. If the target folder is up-to-date, it simply calls your callback.

Note that the callback is only called once recompile is sure that the target folder is up-to-date. If it's not, the callback will never be called inside the current process -- only the spawned one.

Valid options are:

• quiet (default: false) -- if true, don't emit anything to the console when recompiling

• command (default: [ "./node_modules/.bin/coffee", "-o", targetFolder, "-c", sourceFolder ]) -- command to execute to recompile, as an array

• transform (default: (filename) -> filename.replace(/.coffee$/, ".js")) -- transform function to convert source filenames to target filenames

License

Apache 2 (open-source) license, included in 'LICENSE.txt'.

Authors

@robey - Robey Pointer [e-mail]