Hello Internet, I'd like to introduce you to qst. It's pronounced
"quickstart" and it's a tool that lets you get started with projects
quickly.
When learning a new language it's often not clear how to actually run programs in that language and what best practices are. It gets worse when you just want to try out a tool that's written in a language you don't yet know.
And even if you do know the language and have decided what your favourite build system is, sometimes it's difficult to keep track of the right commands to use.
So, why not get a little help? That's qst.
$ git clone git://github.com/heyLu/expandr
...
$ qst expandr
expandr'ing on 0.0.0.0:3000
That's it. Now you've got a webserver running on http://localhost:3000 that is able to unshorten urls.
The project is written in Haskell, but you don't have to know that. If
you have cabal installed, qst will just run that and set everything
up.
qst supports C, Clojure, Haskell, Idris, Julia, Python, Ruby,
JavaScript, Makefiles and quite few more as of now (September 2014) and
it's easy to add more. In most cases it's one line that tells qst how
to recognize the project and how to run it.
Some project types also support different "steps" to run, e.g. for just building the project or running the test suite.
Run one-file projects in any language:
$ qst server.go
Running on http://localhost:3000
...
If you now edit server.go and save, qst will restart the server.
The delay between restarts is also configurable using -delay:
$ qst -delay=1m complex-thing.jl
...
If you just want to know the type of a project, you can do that as well:
$ qst -detect ~/projects/uh-what-was-this-thing
idris/default
You can also have it run just the tests or only build:
$ qst -step=test ~/projects/rails-tutorial
...
All tests passed!
And finally, you can even fetch and run projects from github in one step:
$ qst -remote github.com/heyLu/qst/examples/hello_web.rb
In most cases qst looks for certain files to determine the project
type, but in general you pass it a path and then it asks all it's
project types whether that path belongs to it. If a type matches, then
that project types' run step is run.
A "step" is just a tiny shell script that calls the build tool for that project.
It's not intended to replace anything, but it should help you get started with things. It tells which commands it runs, so if you don't like them you can have a look, read a bit and then run that.
It's also very simple, it really doesn't do much. It was mainly intended to run things quickly and then let you do more complex things when you need them.
Either download the [lastest version][bin-linux-64bit] (for Linux 64bit,
versions for other systems welcome!) directly, or just go get it:
$ go get git://github.com/heyLu/lp/go
Comments welcome! Try and see if it works for you. If it does, awesome! If it doesn't I'd like to hear what I can do to fix that.