October 09, 2011

App Extensibility, Follow Up

My last post about introducing an extensibility point got some good feedback. I realized two things:

Following the pattern of rails generators was huge overkill
I wasn’t thinking correctly about the problem to begin with

Rails generators need to support a lot of things. For example, they need to process command line arguments, consume or produce templates, and update existing files in a non-destructive way. The potential complexity in generators is handled by the complexity in the extensility model implemented in rails. Arbitrarily duplicating this complexity (magic class names, inheritance, etc) is just wrong. Which, of course, is why I said:

OK, I’m doing something wrong, I just know it

If I was going to continue down this road (I’m not, see below) I would take a cue from something like Sinatra and take advantage of global methods to reduce/remove requirements on the configuration code.

configure do |host|
  # do something with 'host' to configure your app
end

But that’s all irrelevent. Jeff Lindsay set me straight in a comment on my previous post.

The hooks that most SCM use, like post-commit or post-receive, are based on running shell scripts. This is my favorite approach so far because it’s not language specific.

DUH. I love those things that I look back and think “of course.”

I was thinking about this as a ruby problem, because localtunnel’s client is written in ruby. But it’s not a ruby problem. Localtunnel is a utility. I can write hooks for Git in anything I want, it doesn’t matter what language Git is written in. The same is true for localtunnel.

Taking this approach greatly simplifies the solution. And the simpler solution is always always always the better solution. In this case, we can add a quick check followed by a system call to enable users to provide a shell hook to configure whatever system(s) they want:

SHELL_HOOK_FILE = "./.localtunnel_callback"

...

if File.exists?(File.expand_path(SHELL_HOOK_FILE))
  system "#{SHELL_HOOK_FILE} ""#{tunnel['host']}""" if File.exists?(File.expand_path(SHELL_HOOK_FILE))
  if !$?.success?
    puts "   An error occurred executing the callback hook #{SHELL_HOOK_FILE}"
    puts "   (Make sure it is executable)"
  end
end

Bam. Localtunnel now provides an extensibility point that can be implemented in any language. Well, it will when/if my pull request is accepted. :)

Thanks, Jeff!

App Extensibility, Follow Up

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