DotSlash: simplified executable deployment

DotSlash (dotslash) is a command-line tool that lets you represent a set of platform-specific, heavyweight executables with an equivalent small, easy-to-read text file. In turn, this makes it efficient to store executables in source control without hurting repository size. This paves the way for checking build toolchains and other tools directly into the repo, reducing dependencies on the host environment and thereby facilitating reproducible builds.

The fb-dotslash npm package allows you to use DotSlash in your Node.js projects without having to install DotSlash globally. This is particularly useful for package authors, who have traditionally needed to either include binaries for all platforms or manage their own download and caching in a postinstall script.

Using DotSlash in an npm package

First, you'll need to write a DotSlash file that describes the binary you want to distribute.

If your npm package declares fb-dotslash as a dependency, any commands executed as part of npm run and npm exec will have dotslash available on the PATH. This means you can, for example, directly reference DotSlash files in your package.json scripts with no further setup:

{
  "name": "my-package",
  "scripts": {
    "foo": "path/to/dotslash/file"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "fb-dotslash": "^0.5.8"
  }
}

If you need to use dotslash in some other context, you can use require('fb-dotslash') to get the path to the DotSlash executable appropriate for the current platform:

const dotslash = require('fb-dotslash');
const {spawnSync} = require('child_process');
spawnSync(dotslash, ['path/to/dotslash/file'], {stdio: 'inherit']);

License

DotSlash is licensed under both the MIT license and Apache-2.0 license; the exact terms can be found in the LICENSE-MIT and LICENSE-APACHE files, respectively.