Alpine

Alpine is a library creation framework for rapidly building robust libraries and CLI applications.

Features

Alpine allows developers to build a library of methods that can also be used as a CLI out-of-the-box. Amongst each method of the library are features such as:

Run-time type validation
Custom parameter validation
Unit testing using Mocha
and more!

Installation

npm i -g alpine

How to use

To create a new project, run the following command...

alpine new <project_name_here>

This will create a folder in your current directory with the chosen project name. Navigate to the new folder and install the dependencies by running npm i.

At this point, you can immediately start adding methods to the methods folder manually or by using alpine generate method. Each method definition file must export an object which defines the method similar to:

export default {
  name: 'sum', // Name of the method
  parameters: [
    {
      name: 'x',
      type: 'number', // Type validation
      validate: value => value >= 0 && value <= 100 // Custom validation
    },
    {
      name: 'y',
      type: 'number', // Type validation,
      validate: value => value >= 0 && value <= 100 // Custom validation
    }
  ],
  returns: {
    type: 'number',
    validate: value => value >= 0 && value <= 200
  },
  value: (x, y) => x + y // Method definition
};

It's important to note that to define a method, a file must be created with the method's name under /methods. Each method, by default, is CLI enabled meaning you can access it through the CLI of your application. This can be disabled by setting cli: false on the exported object of the method.

If you're curious about other commands that Alpine offers, just run alpine --help for a detailed list!

Project structure

By default, your project will be structured like the following:

Project
├── methods				# Method definitions
|	└── sum.method.js
├── test				# Unit tests
|   └── sum.test.js
├── index.js			# Main hook
├── cli.js				# CLI hook
└── alpine.conf.js		# Alpine configuration

For each method file, there should be one or less unit testing file. The location of where you store methods and tests can be changed by editing your alpine.conf.js.

Testing

npm test

This will build your application and test the resulting bundle with your written unit tests found in /tests.

Building

npm run build

This will build your application using Rollup.js. The result will be three bundles located in /dist. The formats of these three bundles are:

CommonJS
ES Module
UMD (Universal Module Definition)

This allows your library to be used in almost every environment.

License

[License]

Folkwise-io/alpine