Startover

Hey, this is fresh, but essentially it's a little command line tool that will let you watch for file changes and run specific commands when files are changed , not just node commands, suggestions, bugs reports, and feature requests welcome

note this will run any system commands

Installing Startover

We can install Startover globally from NPM

npm i -g startover

Run Startover

We can run startover once it is installed with the following command

startover -d myapp -f hello.js,"bye world.html" -e css,md -c "npm run build" -D test,

It is important to remember that the command/commands we are running from the -c option must be compatible with the system/shell we are running startover in and they will run one after the other

Available Options

The application help information can be found with

startover --help

Or is as follows

Options:
  -V, --version                                       output the version number
  -d, --watch-dirs [directories]                      List of directories to watch, by default will watch current directory
  -c, --commands [commands]                          List of Commands to run when files change
  -f, --exclude-files [files to exclude]              List of Files to Exclude from Watch
  -e, --exclude-extensions [extensions to exclude]    List of Extensions to Exclude from Watch
  -D, --exclude-directories [directories to exclude]  List of Directories to Exclude from Watch
  -a, --run-async                                     Run commands asynchronously [false]
  -h, --help                                          output usage information

Specifying Commands

Long Running Processes

For long running processes that need to be run in the background we can make use of forever, we can add the following scripts to our package.json, for example, or even define them separately

Synchronous

By default the processes will run synchronously in the order in which you define them

package.json

  "scripts": {
    "start": "node app/server.js",
    "build": "browserify public/main.js -o public/bundle.js",
    "forever-start": "forever start app/server.js",
    "forever-stop": "forever stopall"
  },

command line

startover -D docs,node_modules -f hello.js,yes.html -e html,md -c "npm run forever-stop","npm run build","npm run forever-start"

Asynchronous

We can make use of the -a flag to run processes asynchronously as follows, which will run each command specified as a different child process

startover -D docs,node_modules -f hello.js,yes.html -e html,md -c "npm run forever-stop","npm run build","npm run forever-start" -a

Combining Async and Sync

If we need to run some processes synchronously (like stopping our server and then restarting it) but others asynchronously (like managing server processes on a separate thread to compiling a website) we can do it by separating commands that need to run synchronously with <command 1> && <command 2>

startover -D docs,node_modules -f hello.js,yes.html -e html,md -c "npm run forever-stop && npm run forever-start","npm run build" -a

Running Dev

Clone the GitHub Repo, and then install the app dependencies and install the application globally

npm i
npm i -g

Next we can link NPM to our actual package instead of the global version with

npm link

Resources

I've made use of a few different resources for the application as follows

Articles

• Building command line tools with Node.js by Tim Pettersen

Libraries

• Parsing Commands : Commander
• Watching File System : Chokidar