Dev-Loop

Dev-Loop (also known as "dl") is a tool meant to aid in your dev-loop. Specifically it aims to fill the replacement of Makefiles, or the standard bin//ci/ script directory. The one where we have a series of bash scripts that are complex, and easy to break cross operating system. Dev-Loop is meant to make it easy to write workable code that will run the same on every operating system. While also making it clear to seperate concerns. The four biggest goals of dev-loop are:

1. Stability - At the command, config, and implementation levels.
2. Reproducibility - Everything needs to be reproducible.
3. Reusability - It should be easy to build small tasks, that can be reused many times.
4. Expected - We shouldn't surprise a user.

Overview of the Tool

So how does Dev-Loop actually make it easy for you to develop locally?

• Has "Executors". Executors are used to provide a consistent runtime environment. However, they also bridge the gap between themselves, and the localhost. To make that more clear it allows you to run a task in a docker container so you don't have to install everything, but the built binary is still available on your local host.

• Formally defining tasks in: dl-tasks.yml files. No longer do you have to search through bash scripts in order to find what's runnable, and what's a helper. Config is much easier to parse in order to figure out exactly which scripts are being run and in what order.

• The ability to tag tasks. No longer do you have to have a forever growing list of commands in your CI file. Just tag something: ci, and tell dev-loop to run everything with that tag.

Installing Dev-Loop

To Install Dev-Loop all you need to do is install a single binary. To get the latest release binary simply go to the releases page.

You can download the latest binary from github releases. Than all you need to do is move it into your PATH. If you don't know what that is (or you're looking for a particular recommendation) you'll just want to move the binary from your downloads to one of the following event places:

• On Unix Systems: /usr/local/bin/ (i.e.: mv -f ~/Downloads/dl-linux /usr/local/bin/dl)
• On Windows Systems: C:\Windows (i.e.: MOVE -Y C:\Users\[User]\Downloads\dl-win.exe C:\Windows\dl.exe)

Building Dev-Loop

All of the tasks within dev-loop are actually built with dev-loop itself. While you can certainly bootstrap with an older version of dev-loop, you can also trigger a build locally. This guide covers both.

If building with a previous version of dev-loop you do not need to install anything besides docker.

Building with a previous version of dev-loop

The way we recommend getting started is using a previous version of dev-loop. Follow the "Installing Dev-Loop" section to install a previous version of dev-loop.

From there you can start building code with:

$ dl exec build dl

This will put a binary in: ./target/dl

To build a binary ready for release use:

$ dl exec build dl-release

This will put a binary in: ./target/dl-release

Building from Scratch

In order to build from scratch please ensure you have the latest version of Rust installed. Please use rustup to install rust. Since we will need to add support for another "target" in order to build a fully static binary.

Once you've installed the latest rustup. Please follow: these docs to add the musl toolchain. Which will help us get a fully static binary.

Once you do that you can run:

cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

This will build a binary, and stick it at: ./target/x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/release/dev-loop