heward

heward

Heward is a module bundler and deployment tool for Roll20

Introduction

Roll20 is a virtual tabletop application that allows pen-and-paper games to be played online. As part of this experience, Roll20 Pro Users are able to write their own scripts for interacting with the application, ranging from simple macros to complex chat bots and campaign tool managers. These scripts run within the Roll20 API Sandbox, a restricted Node.js virtual machine, and have limitations imposed on them for security or simplicity reasons.

User-created scripts on Roll20 are created and edited from within a browser-based editor with limited capabilities that present serious difficulties for writing and maintaining larger scripts, especially those that would traditionally be broken into several Node.js's modules. Heward solves this problem by serving as a compilation and deployment tool for Roll20, allowing you to write JavaScript in your favorite IDE and deploy to Roll20 as if it were a cloud computing provider.

Install

Install with npm:

npm install --save-dev heward

Install with yarn:

yarn add heward --dev

Usage

After installing heward, you'll need to setup a .env file in your project root. This should contain the following:

# The Roll20 ID for your campaign
ROLL20_CAMPAIGN=

# Your Roll20 username
ROLL20_USERNAME=

# Your Roll20 password
ROLL20_PASSWORD=

With that setup, you can now run heward from the command line:

heward --script ./src/index.js

Heward will compile your script using babel-transform-roll20 and then deploy it to the Roll20 API Sandbox as heward.js. Subsequent deployments of Heward will automatically overwrite your script and restart the sandbox, allowing you the freedom to write and deploy from your local machine.