I want to alias ‘yarn rw’ so badly

[thedavidprice]

Hypothetically, if our installation script prompted users:
“Would you like to alias command line ‘yarn rw’ to ‘r’? y/n”

Would that really be so bad?

Talk me in/out of this ‘cause I’m feeling motivated.

😉

The Rules

1. we only use yarn
2. we only install package locally via package.json bin executable
3. we do not make system settings changes without users' awareness and action (preferrably require a user to decide + act through simple, transparent step)
4. our goal is DX; we want the effect to be a net positive happiness increase

[mojombo]

Just r is pretty ambitious, but I could certainly be convinced that aliasing to rw would be suitable. Do you know of a reliable way to do this across shells and OSes?

[thedavidprice]

I do not, but I'm willing to do some research! To that point might end up being too complicated to cover all cases. Maybe inspect for a limited number of shells/OS's and then gracefully decline if "not recognized".

We could recommend alias, e.g. "rw", but then let the user input their choice.

The easiest way forward --> within "Next Steps" message after successful CRA installation, make a suggestion for users to manually set up themselves.

[arjunv27]

yarn workspace commands should be aliased as well.

[weaversam8]

npm lets users install and invoke binaries supplied by local packages by name, by installing them in node_modules/.bin... does yarn not also do this?

If it does, we could just put a rw.sh and rw.bat or something in node_modules/.bin that simply invokes yarn rw.

[peterp]

@weaversam8 This is exactly what yarn does. They're talking about invoking the commands without having to prefix it with yarn: https://classic.yarnpkg.com/blog/2017/06/19/adding-command-line-aliases-for-yarn/

[weaversam8]

No sorry, I meant that NPM already has the ability to add commands without prefixing it with Yarn. When you install gatsby-cli with NPM globally, it'll enable the ability for you to run gatsby new instead of npm r gatsby new.

I'm pretty sure this should also work if you install gatsby-cli in a local project, you can execute gatsby new in that project folder.

This functionality is provided by the bin key in package.json, which is documented here.

Edit: looks like Yarn supports this key too.

[peterp]

Thanks for the clarification @weaversam8.

A bit more about how this works. Globally installed packages, that have "bin", are added to a place where they're available in your path:

echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

which gatsby
/usr/local/bin/gatsby

We do this for our CLI over here:

redwood/packages/cli/package.json

Lines 6 to 9 in 583ca40

	"bin": {
	"redwood": "./dist/index.js",
	"rw": "./dist/index.js"
	},

But, we prefer not to have people install our CLI globally since we update the CLI fairly frequently and would like to pin it to the redwood projects where you're invoking it from. We imagine you might have several Redwood projects with different versions.

For people that hate typing yarn rw we could suggest two things:

1. Add an alias: alias rw="yarn rw"
2. We could ask people to install a different package globally (@redwoodjs/cli-global-alias) that installed rw and would attempt to call yarn rw from the current working directory.

[weaversam8]

We could ask people to install a different package globally (@redwoodjs/cli-global-alias) that installed rw and would attempt to call yarn rw from the current working directory.

Is there any reason we couldn't roll this into the normal CLI package anyways? That way if someone installs it globally, it'll search first for a local version when executed?

[thedavidprice]

Thanks for chiming in here with discussion and adding clarity + specifics.

I did edit the original comment by adding “The Rules” section. Please read 👀

there are important design choices that require the yarn rw … (which, imho, really isn’t that bad). This discussion isn’t about rolling back those decisions. It’s just about whether or not there’s value in giving the users an option to alias during the installation process (and/or just providing instructions about how to alias themselves as a next step).

[thedavidprice]

@arjunv27 If I understand you correctly, I’m not sure this will be possible. Could you give me an example? That will help me make sure I understand and I could also better explain my thinking.

[arjunv27]

@thedavidprice
Sure:
yarn workspace add web netlify-identity-widget ->
rw add web netlify-identity-widget
don't think this will work w/ aliases however -- at least not in the current state; I'll take a look at the cli

[thedavidprice]

@arjunv27 Ah, thanks for the example. I can see how/why people will alias for this case. But for me it’s not a commmon command I need so wasn’t thinking the same way. More importantly, from a Redwood installation perspective, we won’t address this because it’s specific to using yarn / yarn tooling.

But, again, not that it isn’t something you and many others many very well want to do!

[thedavidprice]

To research:
https://github.com/magic/bash-alias

Wondering what they’re doing under the hood.

[pickleat]

Not sure if this will add much to the discussion, but alias rw="yarn rw" in zsh is working great so far here.

[thedavidprice]

@pickleat Nice! I think the trick on this would be to figure out how to support the top 3-4 shells across Linux/Mac and Windows: bash, zsh, PowerShell, etc. During installation could check shell environment and, if support, prompt user if they want to make life much radder.

Totally doable. And I think totally worth it! (Just need 36 hours in a given day to get it done... )

Anyway, thanks for chiming in 😁

[peterp]

@thedavidprice Are we OK to close this one off now?

[thedavidprice]

This can be accomplished via #3094