fastmod is a fast partial replacement for
codemod. Like codemod, it is
a tool to assist you with large-scale codebase refactors, and it
supports most of codemod's options. fastmod's major philosophical
difference from codemod is that it is focused on improving the use
case "I want to use interactive mode to make sure my regex is correct,
and then I want to apply the regex everywhere". For this use case, it
offers much better performance than codemod. Accordingly, fastmod
does not support codemod's --start, --end, or --count options,
nor does it support anything like codemod's Python API.
Let's say you're deprecating your use of the <font> tag. From the
command line, you might make progress by running:
fastmod -m -d /home/jrosenstein/www --extensions php,html \
'<font *color="?(.*?)"?>(.*?)</font>' \
'<span style="color: ${1};">${2}</span>'
For each match of the regex, you'll be shown a colored diff and asked
if you want to accept the change (the replacement of the <font> tag
with a <span> tag), reject it, or edit the line in question in your
$EDITOR of choice.
NOTE: Whereas codemod uses Python regexes, fastmod uses the Rust
regex crate, which supports a
slightly different regex syntax and does not support look around or
backreferences. In particular, use ${1} instead of \1 to get the
contents of the first capture group, and use $$ to write a literal
$ in the replacement string. See the regex crate's
documentation for details.
A consequence of this syntax is that the use of single quotes instead
of double quotes around the replacement text is important, because the
bash shell itself cares about the $ character in double-quoted
strings. If you must double-quote your input text, be careful to
escape $ characters properly!
fastmod also offers a usability improvement over codemod: it
accepts files or directories to process as extra positional arguments
after the regex and substitution. For instance, the example above
could have been rewritten as
fastmod -m --extensions php,html \
'<font *color="?(.*?)"?>(.*?)</font>' \
'<span style="color: ${1};">${2}</span>' \
/home/jrosenstein/www
This makes it possible to use fastmod to process a list of files
from somewhere else if needed. Note, however, that fastmod does its
own parallel directory traversal internally, so doing find ... | xargs fastmod ... may be much slower than using fastmod by itself.
fastmod is primarily supported on macOS and Linux.
fastmod has also been reported to work reasonably well on
Windows. The major portability concerns are 1) the use of $EDITOR
with a fallback and 2) the console UI, which is descended from
codemod's ncurses-based text coloring & screen clearing
code. Windows-specific issues and PRs will be considered as long as
they aren't too invasive. For example, if something doesn't work on
Windows because a Linux/Mac-specific API was used instead of
equivalent POSIX or Rust standard library calls, we would be happy to
fix that. On the other hand, we would like to avoid taking a direct
winapi dependency or substantially increasing the size of our
dependency graph for Windows-only enhancements.
fastmod is written in (stable) Rust
and compiles with Rust's cargo build system. To build:
$ git clone https://github.com/facebookincubator/fastmod.git
$ cd fastmod
$ cargo build --release
$ ./target/release/fastmod --help
...
The easiest way to install fastmod is simply cargo install fastmod. If you have built fastmod from source following the
directions above, you can install your build with cargo install.
fastmod uses the
ignore
crate to walk the given directory hierarchy using multiple threads in
parallel while respecting .gitignore. It uses the
grep
crate to match each file, reads matching files into memory, applies
the given regex substitution one match at a time, and uses the
diff crate to present the
resulting changes as patches for human review.
See fastmod --help.
fastmod is Apache-2.0-licensed.