Friday, 21 September, 2018 UTC
Summary
In a previous post I mentioned that a
scripts directory can be a welcome addition to any source code repository. What goes into scripts? Anything you can automate to make a developer’s life easier!Examples for Inspiration
Here’s a script I’ve used to simplify adding an EF migration. All I need to do from the command line is
addmigration [migration_name].pushd src\beaverleague.data dotnet ef migrations add %1 dotnet ef database update popd
I also have a
recreatedb script I can use to start fresh after pulling changes.pushd src\beaverleague.web dotnet run dropdb migratedb seeddb stop popd
More on how the parameters above work in a future post.
The EF repo itself uses a tools folder instead of a scripts folder, but the idea is the same. Inside you’ll find scripts to clean up test environments by dropping and shrinking databases, like this one that uses a combination of
sqlcmd and sqllocaldb command line tools, as well as a script to query for all the non-system databases in a DB instance.@echo off sqlcmd -S "(localdb)\mssqllocaldb" -i "DropAllDatabases.sql" -o "DropAll.sql" sqlcmd -S "(localdb)\mssqllocaldb" -i "DropAll.sql" del "DropAll.sql" sqllocaldb stop mssqllocaldb sqllocaldb delete mssqllocaldb ShrinkLocalDBModel.cmd
For more examples and ideas, checkout the TypeScript repo with scripts for everything from running tests to automating GitHub issues with OctoKit. There’s the vscode repo with scripts to setup an environment. The repo to build the official .NET Docker images includes Powershell scripts to execute
docker pull with retries.These are all examples where 5 or 6 lines of script code can not only save time for the entire team in the long run, but also codify a common operation.
dotnet
I specifically want to call out special capabilities of the
dotnet CLI tool. We’ve always had the ability to build, publish, and package from the command line, but the new global tools feature gives us an npm-ishly easy path to installing new tools and use them from anywhere.Here are some of the tools I use.
- dotnet-certes – automate certificate acquisition.
- dotnet-aspnet-codegenerator - scaffold new items without using Visual Studio
- dotnet-cake – execute Cake builds.
- dotnet-ignore – download .gitignore starter files from GitHub.
- dotnet-script – execute C# scripts.
- dotnet-search – search for NuGet packages
- dotnet-serve – a simple HTTP server like npm’s http-server.
- dotnet-git-status-cli – look at the status of multiple repositories in a directory tree.
- dotnet-srihash-cli – compute the sub-resource integrity hash for script tags.
Nate McMaster maintains a more complete list of global tools.
Summary
Take advantage of the command line renaissance in .NET Core to speed up a repeatable development process.