Portable Node

"Its more than just that."

Scripts

dl.bat

Downloads all versions of software-products from vendors and repacks them into vendors/[name]/[internal version].7z. The download will be skipped if that archive does already exist.

dl.bat takes names of software as its arguments (see the "How to add software?" section). If no arguments are passed, all software will be downloaded.

mk.bat

Bundles multiple software-products into one archive.

A bundled pack is defined within the data/packs/ directory by a file named [name of pack].txt. Each line of that file is one version of a software-product previously downloaded. The format of one line is:

[name of software],[internal version],[directory]

[name of software] will be copied to [directory] within the pack.

The pack itself will be archived in dist/[name of pack].zip

build.bat

Creates a whole portable environment.

build.bat [name] [name of pack] [name of pack] ...

The above command creates build/[name].zip. See data/layout.txt for the directory-layout.

portable.bat inside the .zip will start a portable command- prompt.

How to add software?

tl;dr

Create scripts/dl/[name].bat Arguments passed by dl.bat: [external version] [directory] What to script: Download the [external version] of [name] and place all files to [directory]
Create data/versions/[name].txt Each line is a version. The format of a line is: [internal version],[external version] Use [internal version] to normalize versions.

Details

[name]

The software has a [name]. It must only contain 0-9, a-z, A-Z and _ (regexp \w) No whitespace or any other characters are allowed. Also, that [name] must be unique among the all the other software-product-names.

The download-script

Now go create a file in scripts/dl/ named [name].bat, where [name] is the name of the software. This script will be called by dl.bat.

The arguments passed to [name].bat are:

version The external version-string of the software.
directory The path to a existing directory to extract all files of the software to.

It is totally up to the script to download the correct version of [name] and copy the files to directory.

Important: The script must copy the root of the software to directory. Not teatimer/*, just *. I hope you understand what I mean.

The versions-file

Having scripts/dl/[name].bat in place, create a file in data/versions/ named [name].txt. This is where the known versions for [name] are listed. One version is one line. The format of one line: [internal version],[external version]

The distinction between internal and external version is made to provide a mechanism to normalize versions. The [external version] is the version-string passed to scripts/dl/[name].bat. The [internal version] will be used for all other operations.

And as nobody likes timestamps in version-strings but the dl- script of [name] might need it, 0.1.3,0.1.3-20120105-34-np is just perfect to get rid of those timestamps and other garbage in version-strings.

Final Checklist

scripts/dl/[name].bat created
data/versions/[name].txt created

Now run dl.bat [name]. If it succeeds, look into vendors/[name]/ for [internal version].7z.

The Data Directory

./data/versions/*.txt

The * is the name

Authors / Contributors

Oliver Leics oliver.leics@gmail.com

oevl/portable-node