QuickBase CLI

Writing custom code inside QuickBase sucks. Copy/pasting from your editor sucks. This simple command line tool lets you easily upload your local code files to a QuickBase application so you don't have to do either of those.

Installation

Requirements: Node.js >= 8

npm install -g quickbase-cli

Usage

quickbase-cli can be used for basic QuickBase code page development. It's probably possible to use quickbase-cli with modern SPA cli tools (angular cli, create-react-app, vue cli, etc.), but I haven't actually tried it so let me know how it goes.

There are three commands available for quickbase-cli:

• qb init
• qb deploy
• qb new

qb init

qb init

This is required in order to use the qb deploy command.

Initialize an existing app with quickbase-cli functionality. Respond to the prompts to create a config file called quickbase-cli.config.js which is used by other quickbase-cli commands. Run qb init from the root of your application, as the config file will be placed wherever the command is run.

Below are the prompts (see the Notes below for an important advisory re: entering your QuickBase password when prompted):

{
  name: 'username',
  message: 'QuickBase username:'
},
{
  name: 'password',
  message: 'QuickBase password (Leave blank to use the QUICKBASE_CLI_PASSWORD env variable):'
},
{
  name: 'dbid',
  message: 'Main DBID for the QuickBase application:'
},
{
  name: 'realm',
  message: 'QuickBase realm:'
},
{
  name: 'appToken',
  message: 'QuickBase application token (if applicable):'
},
{
  name: 'appName',
  message: 'Code page prefix (leave blank to disable prefixing uploaded pages):'
}

qb deploy

qb deploy [options] <file path or directory>

# examples
qb deploy -w app/index.js
qb deploy -x dist/
qb deploy -wx build/bundle.js

This will upload the file(s) at <file path or directory> to the QuickBase application configured in quickbase-cli.config.js. In addition, the value for appName in quickbase-ci.config.js will be prepended to all uploaded files (ex: if appName='demo' then 'demo-bundle.js', 'demo-index.html', and 'demo-bundle.css' might be example output file names). If you don't want to prepend anything to your uploaded files leave this field empty.

If no <file path or directory> is given then the current directory will be deployed.

THAT WAS AN IMPORTANT FACT, PAY ATTENTION WHEN RUNNING qb deploy -- DON'T UPLOAD YOUR NODE_MODULES DIRECTORY TO QUICKBASE...

There are two optional flags that can be passed to qb deploy. You can use them individually or multiple at a time:

• -w (or --watch): watch for changes to <file path or directory> and deploy to QuickBase on change. After the initial deploy only the file that changes will be uploaded to QuickBase unless the -x flag is also passed, in which case the entire <file path or directory> source will be uploaded.
• -x (or --replace): If you pass a directory to qb deploy then all files will run through a regex to replace asset file includes (i.e. <script src="bundle.js"></script>, <link href="bundle.css"/>, etc.) with their new QuickBase urls (<script src="realm.quickbase.com/db/dbayemay?a=dbpage&pageID=123"></script>). This is in no way an optimized command, so I'd avoid running it on YUGE directories.

qb new (mostly useless)

qb new <github-repo> <project-name>

# example
qb new cullenjett/quickbase-template myAwesomeProject

This command will start a new application by cloning a Github repo from <github-repo> (formatted as "github username/repo name") and generate the project at ./<project-name>. Both <github-repo> and <project-name> are required.

For now this is only a wrapper around git clone. After you pull down a repo you will need to run qb init if the app doesn't have a quickbase-cli.config.js file in it already. The end goal is to have starter-template repos available for quick and easy kick off.

Notes

• Instead of exposing your password for the quickbase-cli.config.js file you can rely on an environment variable called QUICKBASE_CLI_PASSWORD. If you have that variable defined and leave the password empty when prompted the qb deploy command will use it instead. Always practice safe passwords.

• ~~Moves are being made to add cool shit like a build process, global defaults, awesome starter templates, and pulling down existing code files from QuickBase. They're not out yet, so for now you're on your own.~~

• I no longer work with QuickBase applications, so the cool shit I had planned won't happen unless someone submits some dope pull requests.