Folke Lemaitre

Posted on Jan 22, 2020 • Originally published at github.com

🏃⛰ Smarter, prettier and faster package scripts with Ultra-Runner

#npm #node #showdev #javascript

Smart and beautiful script runner that hijacks any npm run, yarn and npx calls for ultra fast execution.

❓ Why

Use one command to run package scripts, locally installed binaries or system binaries

	`npm run`	`npx`	`yarn`	`yarn exec`	`ultra`
`package.json` scripts	✅	❌	✅	❌	✅
`./node_modules/.bin/`	❌	✅	✅	✅	✅
system binaries	❌	✅	❌	✅	✅

🤓 Smart

Ultra parses your package.json and hijacks any npm run, yarn and npx calls.
Shell operators like &&, ; and || are also interpreted.

For example:

{
  "scripts": {
    "lint": "yarn lint:ts && yarn lint:eslint && yarn lint:docs",
    "lint:eslint": "npx eslint bin/*.js src/*.ts __tests__/*.ts --cache",
    "lint:docs": "npx markdownlint README.md",
    "lint:ts": "npx tsc -p tsconfig.build.json --noEmit",
    "lint:fix": "yarn lint:eslint --fix"
  }
}

Running ultra lint

Running ultra lint:fix will spawn exactly one child process, directly with the correct command, instead of spawning yarn intermediately

Ultra will additionally execute any configured pre and post scripts, just like npm run and yarn run.

⚡ Ultra Fast

Ultra parses your package.json scripts and will only execute the commands that are really needed. Any script interdependencies are resolved during the parsing stage.
This ensures there's pretty much no overhead in execution by Ultra itself, since it's only running once.
yarn run or npm run on the other hand, will spawn new yarn or npm child processes as needed by the package scripts.

	`npm run`	`npx`	`yarn`	`yarn exec`	`ultra`
execution overhead (1)	250ms	60ms	220ms	200ms	80ms

^{1. each program was run 10x with the command true or {scripts:{"true":"true}} to calculate the execution overhead}

Suppose you would want to run a script that calls 5 other scripts by using && and/or post/pre.

Using yarn, you would have a total overhead of 2.5s (10x 250ms)
Using ultra, you hit the overhead only once, so the total overhead would still be 80ms

To make execution ultra fast, you can configure which scripts should be ran concurrently.

❕ there's no need to switch your scripts over to ultra. Even with the optional configuration you can still use yarn or npm to run your scripts if you want to.

Example builds:

	`yarn`	`ultra` not concurrent	`ultra` concurrent
build Ultra-Runner	8.9s	7.2s	5.1s
build Devmoji	16s	13s	8s

👸 Beautiful

There are three output formats that each can be combined with --silent to hide command output.

--fancy is the default. It shows output in a hieracrhical way and uses spinners to see exactly what's happening.
Make sure to check out the animation at the top of this page as well. Every executed step shows the execution time.

--fancy combined with --silent is useful if you're only interested to see the overview:

--no-fancy doesn't use spinners and prefixes command output with the command name. This is useful for logging purposes.

Combining --no-fancy with --silent shows a flat overview:

--raw will show the exact ouput as you would expect when running the commands stand alone. If the command you're executing is interactive (reads from stdin), then this is the mode you should use.

📦 Installation

Install with npm or yarn

globally

npm install -g ultra-runner
yarn global install ultra-runner

locally inside your project. use with npx ultra

npm install --dev ultra-runner
yarn add --dev ultra-runner

See optional configuration for information on how to setup concurrent script execution.

🚀 Usage

$ ultra --help
Usage: ultra [options]

Options:
  -c|--concurrent  Run the given commands concurrently
  -p|--parallel    alias for --concurrent
  --fancy          enable fancy output, spinners and seperate command output. Default when a TTY (default: true)
  --no-fancy       disables fancy output, spinners and seperate command output. Default when not a TTY. Useful for logging
  --raw            Output only raw command output
  -s|--silent      skip script output. ultra console logs will still be shown
  --color          colorize output (default: true)
  --no-color       don't colorize output
  -d|--dry-run     output what would be executed
  -v|--version     output the version number
  -h, --help       output usage information

use --concurrent to quickly run some commands in parallel. Any of the commands below are valid:
- ultra --concurrent lint \; test \; build
- ultra --concurrent "lint ; test ; build"
- ultra --concurrent "lint && test && build"
use --dry-run to see what would be executed. The output is similar to --fancy --silent

⚙️ Optional Configuration

To allow parallel execution of your scripts, you can specify scripts that should run concurrently,
in your package.json.

{
  "scripts": {
    "lint:eslint": "npx eslint bin/*.js src/*.ts __tests__/*.ts --cache",
    "lint:docs": "npx markdownlint *.md",
    "lint:ts": "npx tsc -p tsconfig.build.json --noEmit",
    "lint": "yarn lint:eslint && yarn lint:docs && yarn lint:ts",
    "prebuild": "yarn lint && yarn jest",
    "build": "..."
  },
  "ultra": {
    "concurrent": ["lint"]
  }
}

yarn build will run the lint and jest commands sequentially
ultra build will run all lint commands concurrently and then execute jest. (note that we can also add prebuild to concurrent, since tests don't depend on linting. this way all commnands would run concurrently)

Notice how the sum of execution times of the seperate lint commands is lower than the total time:

Top comments (6)

Joe Pea • May 18

Will this project come alive again? I see it hasn't been developed for 3 years. I was watching it, and wanted to try it out eventually after it got battle tested on smaller monorepos. NPM has new and improved workspace support (lerna and yarn too).