what is plugsuit

if you are the sort of person who creates command-line tools that do lots of discrete tasks which have little in common you may have come up with a way to separate the tasks as required for orthogonality, while keeping the shared code in one place. an example of a product that does this is awscli, which accomplishes this by hiding the majority of the code back in a web interface, with the code and error checking being done on the remote end, rather than locally on the machine running the commands.

plugsuit allows you to create small, largely-self-contained 'plugs' that contain code for doing things. rather than having to handle things like command-line argument parsing, 'usage' strings, handling improper arguments, and things of this nature, plugsuit allows you to focus on the actual code, and manages the actual running of the eva^W primary process in a consistent, unit-testable, easily-managed way.

if you find yourself with fifteen or more tasks that do different things but need to share configuration or libraries, and you're doing this all in the shell, plugsuit may be for you.

the code, show me the code

okay, so, plugsuit takes "plugs." an example of a plug follows (which is also in the examples directory):

// asuka.js
//   says some lovable, if over-enthusiastic things to the console
//   stolen shamelessly from: http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0018088/quotes

var meta = function () {
	return {
		'args' : {
			'eva-02'    : [ Boolean, 'Start Eva-02' ],
			'artillery' : [ Boolean, 'Take care of oncoming artillery' ],
			'shinji'    : [ Boolean, 'A Shinji appears!' ]
		},

		'name' : 'asuka',
		'abstract' : 'Various interactions with Asuka Langley Sôryû'
	}
};

var plug = function (args) {
	var replies = {
		'artillery' : 'Schwein-hund!',
		'shinji'    : 'How disgusting.',
		'eva-02'    : "You're thinking in Japanese, aren't you? If you MUST think, do it in German!"
	};

	Object.keys( args ).forEach( function (arg) {
		if (replies[arg]) {
			console.log( replies[arg] );
		}
	} );
};

module.exports = plug;
plug.meta      = meta;

this defines a 'task' as asuka, and we presume this lives in bin/asuka.js. we would then presumably create something that looks like

#!/usr/bin/env node

// eva-pilot.js
//   manage eva pilots for NERV

'use strict;'

require( 'plugsuit' ).init( 'bin' ).dispatch( process.argv )

accordingly, one should then be able to run:

$ eva-pilot.js asuka --artillery

and the results should be as expected.

no really, what is a plugsuit?

probably you should watch neon genesis evangelion.

author

@janearc, [email protected]