executive

executive

An elegant child_process.spawn/child_process.spawnSync. Automatically pipes stderr and stdout for you in a non-blocking fashion, making it very useful with build tools and task runners. Great async support, Node.js and Promises both supported. Easy serial and parallel command execution.

Features

• Node.js callback, Promises and synchronous APIs.
• Serial execution by default, parallel optional.
• Automatically pipes stderr and stdout by default.
• Streams stderr and stdout rather than blocking on command completion.
• Automatically uses shell when command uses operators or globs.
• New-line delimited strings are automatically executed sequentially.

Install

$ npm install executive

Usage

No need to echo as stderr and stdout are piped by default.

var exec = require('executive');

exec('uglifyjs foo.js --compress --mangle > foo.min.js')

It's easy to be quiet too.

exec.quiet('uglifyjs foo.js --compress --mangle > foo.min.js')

Callbacks and promises supported.

exec.quiet('ls -l', function(err, stdout, stderr) {
    var files = stdout.split('\n');
})

{stdout} = yield exec.quiet('ls -l')
var files = stdout.split('\n');

Automatically serializes commands.

exec(['ls', 'ls', 'ls'], function(err, stdout, stderr) {
    // All three ls commands are called in order.
});

exec(`
ls
ls
ls`) // Same;

Want to execute your commands in parallel? No problem.

{stdout} = yield exec.parallel(['ls', 'ls', 'ls'])

Options

Options are passed as the second argument to exec. Helper methods for quiet, interactive, parallel and sync do what you expect.

exec('ls', {options: quiet})

and

exec.quiet('ls')

are equivalent.

options.interactive | exec.interactive

default false

If you need to interact with a program (your favorite text editor for instance) or watch the output of a long running process (tail -f), or just don't care about checking stderr and stdout, set interactive to true:

exec.interactive('vim', function(err) {
    // Edit your commit message or whatnot
});

options.quiet | exec.quiet

default false

If you'd prefer not to pipe stdin, stdout, stderr set quiet to false:

exec.quiet(['ls', 'ls'], function(err, stdout, stderr) {
    // Not a peep is heard, and both ls commands will be executed.
});

options.sync | exec.sync

default false

Blocking version of exec. Returns {stdout, stderr} or throws an error.

options.parallel | exec.parallel

default false

Uses parallel rather than serial execution of commands.

options.shell

default null

Force a shell to be used for command execution.

Extra credit

Great with cake, grunt, gulp and other task runners.

Shortcake (a superset of Cake) lets you take advantage of the Promise API to write synchronous looking async tasks:

require 'shortcake'

task 'package', 'Package project', ->
  yield exec '''
    mkdir -p dist/
    rm   -rf dist/*
  '''

  yield exec.parallel '''
    cp manifest.json dist/
    cp -rf assets/   dist/
    cp -rf lib/      dist/
    cp -rf views/    dist/
  '''

  yield exec '''
    zip -r package.zip dist/
    rm -rf dist/
  '''