[Proposal] Using POSIX shell commands in tasks chain

It is just a weird idea and I want to know what do you guys think.

Basically I like Make due to it’s “UNIXy”, like you have a lot of tools for text wrangling and you can do almost everything you can imagine without any hustle, just by using well known shell power tools.

But when we speak about node build systems, we have some limitations. We run builds usually in *nix env, but what if I want to make this steps.

• read file
• get subset of it
• replace character with other one
• save to file

This is a trivial task using tools like tails, sed or grep, but it involves writting custom plugins with Fly

Basically what I propose is to add method shell or something similar to Fly instance that will look like

x['get-subset'] = function () {
  yield this.source(someFile)
    .shell('head -10 | sed -i s/test/changed $file')
    .target('/dist')
}

How this can be acomplished

.shell accepts raw string of shell command parse it and generate proper calls using shelljs and returns execution result.

It can be useful for additional text transformation or some file system manipulations before or after task.

cc @jbucaran @lukeed

[devmondo]

i may not be qualified to elaborate on this, but shell commands is something as @lukeed said is not used that often, and i believe it is not the responsibility of Fly to provide that, it should be a plugin or direct use of the required Lib. same like fly does not provide browser-sync, or babel compiling as built in, otherwise it would defeat the purpose of Fly being small easy and flexible.

in my experience, i wanted to use nodemon, babel, and browser-sync, and even though there are Fly plugins for this, i did not even need it, i just used them directly as if i would in any node.js application and man this was a breath of fresh air to escape from Gulp plugins, which you have to wait for developers to fix bug or upgrade to latest babel for example.

Fly workflow for me is awesome, it gives you the simple nature of NPM scripts with the power of Gulp as task runner, but with really minimal rules and open freedom to compose your code or use any Node.js package.

[lukeed]

Update: My plugin was renamed to fly-shell. Thank you to @danny-andrews for relinquishing the name.

Pinging @hzlmn since you probably interested.