BRS: Off-Roku BrightScript
An interpreter for the BrightScript language that runs on non-Roku platforms.
Installation
The BRS project is published as a node
package, so use npm
:
$ npm install -g brs
or yarn
if that's your preference:
$ yarn global add brs
Usage
This repo provides the brs
executable, which operates in two ways.
REPL
An interactive BrightScript REPL (Read-Execute-Print Loop) is available by running brs
with no arguments, e.g.:
$ brs
brs> ?"Dennis Ritchie said ""Hello, World!"""
Dennis Ritchie said "Hello, World!"
Quit by entering ^D
(Control-D).
Executing a file
BRS can execute an arbitrary BrightScript file as well! Simply pass the file to the brs
executable, e.g.:
$ cat hello-world.brs
?"Dennis Ritchie said ""Hello, World!"""
$ brs hello-world.brs
Dennis Ritchie said "Hello, World!"
Sure, but why?
The Roku series of media streaming devices are wildly popular amongst consumers, and several very popular streaming services offer Channels for the Roku platform. Unfortunately, Roku chanels must be written in a language called BrightScript, which is only executable directly on a Roku device. BRS hopes to change that by allowing Roku developers to test their code on their own machines, thus improving the quality of their channels and the end-user's experience as a whole.
So can I use this to watch TV without a Roku?
Nope! The BRS project currently has no intention of emulating the Roku user interface, integrating with the Roku store, or emulating content playback. In addition to likely getting this project in legal trouble, that sort of emulation is a ton of work. BRS isn't mature enough to be able to sustain that yet.
Building from source
The BRS project follows pretty standard node
development patterns, with the caveat that it uses yarn
for dependency management.
Prerequisites
BRS builds (and runs) in node
, so you'll need to install that first.
Once that's ready, install yarn. Installing it with npm
is probably the simplest:
$ npm install -g yarn
Setup
-
Clone this repo:
$ git clone https://github.com/sjbarag/brs.git
-
Install dependencies:
$ yarn install # or just `yarn`
-
Get
brs
onto yourPATH
:$ yarn link
The build-test-clean dance
Build
This project is written in TypeScript, so it needs to be compiled before it can be executed. yarn build
compiles files in src/
into JavaScript and TypeScript declarations, and puts them in lib/
and types/
respectively.
$ yarn build
$ ls lib/
index.js (and friends)
$ ls types/
index.d.ts (and friends)
Alternatively, you can run the build step in "watch" mode. This will run yarn build
for you automatically, every time it detects source file changes:
$ yarn watch
This is often useful for testing that local changes work in your BrightScript project, without having to run yarn build
over and over.
Testing
Tests are written in plain-old JavaScript with Facebook's Jest, and can be run with the test
target:
$ yarn test
# tests start running
Note that only test files ending in .test.js
will be executed by yarn test
.
Cleaning
Compiled output in lib/
and types/
can be removed with the clean
target:
$ yarn clean
$ ls lib/
ls: cannot access 'lib': No such file or directory
$ ls types/
ls: cannot access 'types': No such file or directory
All Together
Thanks to the npm-run-all package, it's trivially easy to combine these into a sequence of tasks without relying on shell semantics:
$ yarn run-s clean build test