depz

Command line tool for symlinking directories with reusable code into the working project.

Language-agnostic. Tested with Python and Flutter.

Motivation

Reusing code should be simple. If I have the needed code in a nearby directory, I just want to include it into the project. Without packaging it as a library for distribution or messing with IDE settings.

So I will probably just create a symlink:

$ ln -s /abc/libs/mylib /abc/myproject/mylib

Now myproject sees mylib as a local directory myproject/mylib. I can edit both myproject and mylib while working on myproject.

depz automates the creation of such symbolic links, solving emerging problems:

• Portability. To make the symlinks easy to recreate on another system
• Dependencies. To include not only mylib, but all the dependencies of mylib

Usage

• Specify dependencies in depz.txt
• Run the command depz

Specify dependencies

File xxx/depz.txt lists dependencies for xxx:

• /abc/myproject/depz.txt for myproject
• /abc/libs/mylib/depz.txt for mylib

The depz.txt format:

# lines prefixed by hashes are ignored

# lines that specify local directory 
# names are LOCAL dependencies:

/absolute/path/to/mylib1
../libs/mylib2
~/path/mylib3

# lines that cannot be resolved to an existing 
# directory are considered EXTERNAL dependencies

requests
numpy

Local dependencies are recursive

When a project depends on local mylib, it means, it also depends on all the dependencies of mylib. So after scannig myproject/depz.txt we will also scan mylib/depz.txt the same way.

Paths are relative to parent of depz.txt

But resulting links will always reside in the project dir. For example, when running in /abc/proj:

Run

$ cd /abc/myproject
$ depz link