Sideline, a CoffeeScript shell for your server /by @assaf

Professor Biff Wellington demonstrates the transfer of Mad Cow Disease to common garden tomatoes. Next he will try to transfer a whole cow. Once his research is complete he hopes to produce beef tomatoes.

Use Sideline in development to troubleshoot bugs, munge data, live-edit functions, test code snippets.

Connect Sideline over SSH to troubleshoot production instance.

Run Sideline in standalone mode and use model objects to mess with the database.

Sideline talks CoffeeScript.

Add a shell to your Web server

With Express you could:

Sideline = require("sideline")
 
server.configure "development", ->
  Sideline.with(server: server).listen()

Connect to the running server and do stuff:

$ sideline
> server.settings.env
'development'
> server.routes.routes.post.map (r)-> r.path
[ '/signin', '/signup', '/v1/push', '/upload' ]
> server.settings.cache = false
false

Things you will always find in the global scope:

console
global
process
module
setTimeout/clearTimeout
setInterval/clearInterval
sideline
require
_

The _ property hold the result of the last statement.

Use sideline.with( to add more properties to the global scope.

Edit code snippets with the scratchpad

The .edit command opens a text editor, and runs the code when you’re done:

$ sideline
> .show
 
> .edit
1
> .show
c = "foo:bar:baz"
c.split().length

Use .show to see the contents of the scratchpad.

You can also use .edit and .show to edit functions:

$ sideline
> .show foo.bar
foo.bar = ->
  "before"
> .edit foo.bar
> foo.bar()
'after'
> .show foo.bar
foo.bar = ->
  "after"

Sideline uses the editor from the SIDELINE_EDITOR or EDITOR environment variable.

For example, for Vim you would want to use: vim --nofork -c "set syntax=coffee".

See more commands by typing .help.

Add an application shell

You can run Sideline as standalone shell by connecting to itself:

#!/usr/bin/env coffee
app = require("config/app")
Sideline = require("sideline")
Sideline.with(app: app).connect()

Sideline defaults to port 1973, but when used in this way will upgrade to port 1974.

Teleporting into production

Use your SSH access to tunnel into production instance:

$ ssh -f -L 1973:localhost:1973 -N awesome.do.ma.in
$ sideline
>

You’ll need to have Sideline listen to connections in production. Sideline does not allow connections unless told to.

Enjoy.

Labnotes

The Daily Hi