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Friday, February 17, 2012

npm installable version of weinre

As part of the port of weinre from Java to node.js it seemed logical to make it, somehow, npm installable.

Success.

There is currently a tar.gz download of the weinre runtime available at the pmuellr/incubator-cordova-weinre downloads page. I may keep a 'recent' build here until I get the continuous builds of weinre at Apache working. At which point, the tar.gz should be available somewhere at apache.

Of course, let me know if you have any issues. Preferred place for discussion is the weinre Google Group.

install locally

npm install https://github.com/downloads/pmuellr/incubator-cordova-weinre/weinre-node-1.7.0-pre-2012-02-17--16-47-15.tar.gz

After that install, you can run weinre via

./node_modules/.bin/weinre

install globally

sudo npm -g install https://github.com/downloads/pmuellr/incubator-cordova-weinre/weinre-node-1.7.0-pre-2012-02-17--16-47-15.tar.gz

After that install, you can run weinre via

weinre

notes/caveats

  • The command-line options have not changed, although the --reuseAddr option is no longer supported.

  • There is no longer a Mac 'app' version of weinre.

  • This is not an 'official build' of weinre, in the Apache sense. I need to figure out what that even means first.

  • These 'unofficial' builds have a horrendous semver patch version names. Deal. If you have a better scheme, please let me know.

  • I don't have plans to ever put weinre up at npmjs.org, since I have no idea how this would work, in practice. I don't want to own the weinre package up there; ideally it would be owned by Apache. Can't see how that would work either. If I ever do put a weinre package up at npm, I think it would be a placeholder with instructions on how to get it from Apache. Or maybe there's a way we can auto-link the npmjs.org package to Apache mirrors somehow?

  • I need to look at whether I should continue to ship all my package's pre-reqs (and their pre-reqs, recursively) or not. And relatedly, whether I should actually make fixed version pre-reqs of all the recursively pre-req'd modules. An issue came up today that I "refreshed" the node_modules, and got an unexpected update to the formidable package (a pre-req of connect which is a pre-req of express which is a pre-req of weinre). That's not great. And could be fixed by having explicit versioned dependencies of all the recursively pre-req'd modules in weinre itself. Sigh. What do other people do here?

  • Prolly need to improve the user docs. The remainder of this blog post is the shipped README.md file. So, to read the docs, start the server, read the docs the server embeds, online. Sorry.

running

For more information about running weinre, you can start the server and browse the documentation online.

Start the server with the following command

node weinre

This will start the server, and display a message with the URL to the server. Browse to that URL in your web browser, and then click on 'documentation' link, which will display weinre's online documentation. From there click on the 'Running' page to get more information about running weinre.

Update: Patrick Kettner posted a link to this blog post on Hacker News, so you can discuss there, since I'm one of those "disable comments on blog" people. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3604291.

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