jeswin / wireman

Tools for node.js multi-module project automation

wireman

Build tools for node.js multi-package projects - without having to deploy them to npm for every little change you make. For instance, if you have a project A which depends on B which depends on C, you can use wireman to automatically build project C and project B while building project A.

For all projects, wireman will fetch all deps from npm (according to package.json), run a build command and npm link it into the global node_modules directory.

Installation

Install yarn and basho first. These are required dependencies for now. We need yarn because npm has long standing bugs - someone tell them.

npm i -g yarn
npm i -g basho

Then install wireman

npm i -g wireman

Usage

Create a file called 'wireman.json' in the project's root directory, containing:

• the name of the the build script
• a list of local dependencies which need to be built and linked

The dependencies must be checked out into the same parent directory. For instance, in the above example projects A, B and C must be cloned into the same parent directory.

Here's an example wireman.json

{
  "build": "./build.sh",
  "localDependencies": [
    "some-dep",
    "some-other-dep"
  ],
  "localDevDependencies": [
    "some-dev-dep"
  ]
}

Similarly, if the project "some-dep" has its own local dependencies, create a wireman.json in "some-dep" as well.

Once you're done defining wireman config files for all your projects, do this every time you change a project. It will build and link all your projects which have changes since the last time it was run.

# cd into your project directory
wireman link

# or otherwise
wireman link --config /path/to/project

To force a rebuild of all local dependencies (irrespective of whether changed or not):

wireman link --force

Linking does not build the main project. You could do that manually, or use the build command. The build command builds and links all the local dependencies and finally builds the main project as well.

wireman build

Help needed

1. Unit tests
2. OSX support