Dryduck

Every programmer knows dry. Don’t repeat yourself. So why repeat yourself across platforms, writing the same thing twice? Dryduck is a tool for code-sharing across cross-platform apps. It’s a fork of wml

Why?

Let’s face it, sometimes symbolic links just aren’t enough. Github has more than 10K issues with the words “support for symlinks” in them.

Two examples I’ve encountered so far were: React Native’s packager lack of support for them and Webpack’s inability to find linked modules dependencies (working around this has issues of its own). A lot of people resolve to working directly from the nodemodules folder in these cases, but _a. if your package is required by two projects on which you are working simultaneously, you’re screwed, and b. it just feels wrong.

Dryduck makes use of Facebook’s ultra-fast Watchman to watch for changes in your source folder and copy them (and only them) into your destination folder. It makes it possible (unlike wml) to add relative paths into a settingsfile so that you can watch and copy folders across big monorepo’s.

Install

npm install dryduck
#or
yarn add dryduck

Also, make sure you have watchman installed

brew update
brew install watchman

Then, add dryduck to your yarn scripts

scripts: {
    "dryduck": "dryduck",
    ...
}

Usage

# add the link to dryduck using `yarn dryduck add <src> <dest>`
yarn dryduck add ~/my-package ~/main-project/node_modules/my-package
# start watching all links added
yarn dryduck start

Commands

add

yarn dryduck add <src> <dest> (or yarn dryduck a)

Adds a link.

dryduck will not start listening to changes until you start it by running dryduck start.

Each link is given an unique id, you can see all links and their ids by running dryduck list.
Links are saved to src/links.json in your dryduck install directory, meaning that
your configuration is specific to that dryduck install.

rm

yarn dryduck rm <linkId>

Removes a link. Passing all as linkId removes all links.

start

yarn dryduck start (or yarn dryduck s)

Starts dryduck.

It first copies all watched files from source to destination folder and then waits for new changes to happen.

list

yarn dryduck list (or yarn dryduck ls)

Lists all links.

Shows each link’s id, state and source/destination folders.

enable

yarn dryduck enable [linkId] (or yarn dryduck en)

Enables a link. Passing all as linkId enables all links.

If you don’t specify a linkId dryduck will open in interactive mode.

disable

yarn dryduck disable [linkId] (or yarn dryduck d)

Disables a link. Passing all as linkId disabled all links.

If you don’t specify a linkId dryduck will open in interactive mode.

Great for re-using old links without having to type them over and over again.

Miscellaneous

Ignored folders

When adding a new link dryduck will try to detect if your source folder is a git repository or an npm package, it will then offer to ignore the “.git” and “node_modules” folders for you.

If you want to add more folders to your ignored folders first create a file named .watchmanconfig in your source folder, this file should contain Watchman’s configuration for this folder. See example below to learn how populate it or check out the Watchman docs to learn more about Watchman configurations.

In the following example we are ignoring the “.git” and “node_modules” folders:

{
    "ignore_dirs": [".git", "node_modules"]
}

GitHub

View Github