find-project: traverse through folders with ease

find-project is a newly updated tool that allows you to scan a given directory for folders on a depth-first basis. Simply set either the $FP_FOLDER environment variable (or, for backwards compatibility with my old tool, the $GOPATH/src folder, although only $GOPATH needs to be set) to the directory you want to scan, and run the tool by specifying a folder name.

find-project will then traverse through the directory, looking for folders that match the given name. If it finds any, it will print out the full path to the folder to stdout (making it suitable to be used as bash functions, more on this below). If it doesn't find any, it will print out an error message and exit with a non-zero status code.

By default, any vendor folder is skipped as well as any hidden folder (folders starting with a .). You can change this behavior by specifying --include-vendor and/or --include-hidden respectively.

Example

Assume the following folder structure, where the root is either set to $FP_FOLDER or $GOPATH/src:

.
├── github.com/
│   ├── patrickdappollonio/
│   │   ├── http-server
│   │   ├── tgen
│   │   ├── find-project
│   │   ├── foobar
│   │   └── barbaz
│   ├── kubernetes/
│   │   ├── kubernetes
│   │   └── autoscaler
│   └── github/
│       └── octocat
└── gitlab.com/
    └── patrickdappollonio/
        ├── example1
        └── example2

Say you want to go from $FP_FOLDER/github.com/patrickdappollonio/tgen to $FP_FOLDER/github.com/kubernetes/autoscaler. Normally, you could do something like this (unless you have some additional aliases or functions to help you):

$ echo $FP_FOLDER
/home/patrickdap/Projects/

$ pwd
/home/patrickdap/Projects/github.com/patrickdappollonio/tgen

$ cd ../../kubernetes/autoscaler && pwd
/home/patrickdap/Projects/github.com/kubernetes/autoscaler

With find-project, you can do this instead:

$ pwd
/home/patrickdap/Projects/github.com/patrickdappollonio/tgen

$ cd $(find-project autoscaler) && pwd
/home/patrickdap/Projects/github.com/kubernetes/autoscaler

Guaranteeing you just need to remember the folder name you want to go to, and not the entire path.

On two competing folders with the same name, find-project will return the first one it finds, depth-first. For those folders with the same name, the parent folder takes precedence. The folder search is performed on a platform and OS-dependant way, unless --sort-alphabetically is specified (although most platforms might already sort the folders alphabetically).

Usage

You can use the binary directly by calling find-project <folder_name>. The following options are available:

Traverse the directory specified by $FP_FOLDER or $GOPATH to find a folder depth-first.

Usage: find-project [OPTIONS] <FOLDER_NAME>

Arguments:
  <FOLDER_NAME>

Options:
      --include-vendor       Also search in "vendor" folders
      --include-hidden       Also search in hidden (dot) folders
      --sort-alphabetically  Sort folders alphabetically
  -h, --help                 Print help
  -V, --version              Print version

Alternatively, you can wrap the binary in a Bash function to make it easier to use. Add the following to your .bashrc or .bash_profile:

# Name your function whatever you want, I'm using "fp" for "find project".
# Older versions of this program used "gs".
function fp() {
  cd $(find-project $@)
}

This will allow you to run the same command as before, but without the need to type cd after it:

$ pwd
/home/patrickdap/Projects/github.com/patrickdappollonio/tgen

$ fp autoscaler && pwd
/home/patrickdap/Projects/github.com/kubernetes/autoscaler

Installation

Download a binary from the releases page and place it in a folder that is in your $PATH.

Alternatively, if you're on macOS or Linux and you're a Homebrew user, you can install it via Homebrew:

brew install patrickdappollonio/tap/find-project