Bake

Bake supercharges the scripts entry in your package.json. Using Bake, you can parallelize your build with very little effort and keep your log files clean. Oh, and you also get full support for Bash scripts, even on Windows!

How It Works

Bake acts like a little shell and parses whatever you have inside yourscripts field in package.json. It filters the scripts using a pattern that you provided and then starts executing the tasks in parallel. Whenever Bake runs itself during this process, it will catch the command and spawn it in a local pool of processes.

As a consequence to this approach, every sub-program is spawned in just one NodeJS process and all log output can be processed by the same NodeJS process. This not only results in much cleaner log files, but also saves some working memory.

package.json

{
  "scripts": {
     "watch:compile-tests": "tsc -w",
     "watch:tests": "ava --watch",
     "prepare": "tsc --noEmit && webpack --mode production",
     "serve": "webpack serve --mode development"
  }
}

If you run the following command, Bake will run a TypeScript compiler, a test runner and a development server all at once.

bake watch serve

If you want to run two tasks in parallel in package.json, simply add them as arguments to the bake command and Bake will take care of the rest. You can make this even more concise by naming the script "bake". For example:

{
  "scripts": {
    "watch:tests": "ava --watch",
    "watch:sources": "tsc -w --preserveWatchOutput",
    "serve": "webpack serve --mode development",
    "prepare": "tsc --noEmit && webpack --mode production",
    "bake": "bake watch serve"
  }
}

If you run bake with the above configuration your two tasks will run in parallel.

Bake also supports npm/yarn workspaces. When run from the root of the workspace, the program will look up all subprojects and run scripts that matched the given pattern from each subproject.

Bugs And Issues

Currently, not everything from the Bash shell is implemented because most are very rarely used inside a small npm script. Either way, at least the following features are missing:

• Output redirection such as 2>&1, node server.js > log.txt.
• Piping commands, e.g. cat files.txt | xargs -I{} cp {} dest/
• Many builtins that are available in a standard Bash session
• Computed expressions such as $(($num1 + $num2))
• Control flow statements such if, case and while

If you're having an issue, please take the time to report it in the [issue tracker][1]. This will make the tool much more robust and easier for others to pick up.

You can set NODE_ENV=development in your shell to get additional information about how Bake is processing the scripts. Please check the output and post relevant parts if you encountered a bug.

License

The code in this repository is licensed under the MIT license.