bdog - A better bcat

bdog is a commandline utillity written in nodejs. Its functionality is inspired by bcat by Ryan Tomayko, which is a cat utillity for the browser.

I always liked the ability to stream logfiles, json responses or whatever output I came accross inside a terminal to my browser window. The only thing I was always missing was a more sophisticated view inside the browser (eg. Syntax highlighting, JSON data as an unfoldable tree structure, animation highlights if new lines are recieved.). That's why I decided to hack together bdog. As with cat and dog, bdog is supposed to be a better bcat.

Current status

The basic implementation currently ready mimics most of bcats basic behaviour. Therefore it can be used as a drop in replacement in most situations currently. The application architecture allows for easy integration of advanced views and all the graphical stuff I would like in the future. Currently none of those are implemented. They will follow as soon as I got some more spare time.

Installation

Using npm

You may install a running version of bdog using npm:

npm install bdog -g

The above command will install the bdog command globally for your current system.

Cloning the repository

An alternative to using npm for installing is to simply clone the git repository. After that a certain amount of preparation needs to be done in order to install all needed dependencies:

npm install

The npm install task should automatically run grunt to create a build of the software inside the dist folder. Every time you change the code grunt is needed to be run in order to compile the coffee-script code into javascript code