ProjectLauncher

What does it do?

If your switching between projects often there are a lot of different things to open. In my case, this was the projects directory in Sublime Text, SourceTree and Finder. I wanted a command line tool to just launch a project quickly.

These all had command line programs that could be told to open up the required folder.

What systems does it support

It has only been tested on OS X, but the code is in Java so wouldn't require too much work to get goign on another operating system.

What launchables does it come with?

- ord.nz.jordancrawf.projects.ProjectLauncher.SourceTree

This launches the project's path in SourceTree using the stree command.

- ord.nz.jordancrawf.projects.ProjectLauncher.SublimeText

This launches the project's path in Sublime Text using the subl command.

- ord.nz.jordancrawf.projects.ProjectLauncher.Finder

This launches the project's path in Finder using OS X's open command.

How do I make it do my own thing?

There are still many custom 'launchables' that can be added. Just implement the Launchable interface, compile with your lauchables as part of the project, and set your launchables full class path in your .projectlauncher.json file (reflection is used to load the correct classes).

Making your `.projectlauncher.json` file

The JSON file is not yet edited by the program, so it's up to you to define the projects.

This should be located in your home directory, an example is the path of mine which is: /Users/Jordan/.projectlauncher.json

This is an array of objects, each object has a name, path and array of launchables.

name: this is the name used when launching, e.g: use project project1 to launch a project with the name project1

path: this is the full path to the working directory of the project. Full path! i.e.: includes all the /User/[username] stuff if your files are inside your home directory.

launch: the array of launchable classname strings that run when the project launches. See above for the launchables that come with it.

Example:

[
	{
		"name" : "project1",
		"path" : "/Users/username/Sites/project1",
		"launch" :
		[
			"ord.nz.jordancrawf.projects.ProjectLauncher.SublimeText"
		]
	},
	{
		"name" : "project2",
		"path" : "/project2",
		"launch" :
		[
			"ord.nz.jordancrawf.projects.ProjectLauncher.SourceTree",
            "ord.nz.jordancrawf.projects.ProjectLauncher.SublimeText",
            "ord.nz.jordancrawf.projects.ProjectLauncher.Finder"
		]
	}

]

General usage

In Terminal.app, after following the below to install globally.

project lists all current projects that could be found
project [projectname] launches the requested project with the launchables defined in configuration.

Building and Installing

Creating a JAR

I didn't have any luck with getting mvn to automatically creat the jar file for me, so in Eclipse I just used:

Export
Java/Runnable JAR File

Library handling should just be "Package required libraries into generated JAR"

Finish

Launching globally

We want to be able to run project in Terminal from any directory, so:

Put the JAR from above somewhere easy, like in your applications folder
cd /usr/local/bin
nano project (or your favorite text editor)

type: java -jar [location of ProjectLauncher.jar] $@, in my case: java -jar /Applications/ProjectLauncher.jar $@

The $@ you see here is so any additional parameters to project are sent through to the actual JAR file.

We need to be able to execute that command. Do chmod +x project
Now change directory to somewhere else and try the project command. If all goes well, you should get a listing of your projects!

TODO:

make it easier to setup and setup new launchables
cool things like auto-prediction of project as you type, and maybe some way too only open something if the project isn't already open in that program (not sure how to do this though...?)

jordancrawfordnz/projectlauncher