Forem: ehmicky

⛑ JSON serialization should never fail.

ehmicky — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 18:22:24 +0000

safe-json-value is a JavaScript library to prevent JSON.serialize() from:

Throwing
Changing types
Filtering or transforming values unexpectedly

Example:

import safeJsonValue from 'safe-json-value'

const input = { one: true }
input.self = input

JSON.stringify(input) // Throws due to cycle
const { value, changes } = safeJsonValue(input)
JSON.stringify(value) // '{"one":true}"

console.log(changes) // List of changed properties
// [
//   {
//     path: ['self'],
//     oldValue: <ref *1> { one: true, self: [Circular *1] },
//     newValue: undefined,
//     reason: 'unsafeCycle'
//   }
// ]

Cross-platform terminal characters

ehmicky — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 13:19:17 +0000

While ASCII characters display correctly on all terminals, this is not the case of all characters. When building a terminal application or tool, it is common to experience cross-platform issues like:

The main reasons are:

The terminal font might not include this specific character.
The terminal encoding may not support Unicode. For example, cmd.exe on Windows often use specific encodings like CP437, CP850 or Windows-1252.
The application might not be properly converting encodings when reading or writing terminal characters.

The first two points can be solved by using characters known to display correctly on most terminals and environments.

The following repository shows a full list of cross-platform terminal characters: https://github.com/ehmicky/cross-platform-terminal-characters

Those have been tested on:

Ubuntu 20.10, Gnome terminal 3.38.0
macOS 10.14, terminal.app 2.9
Windows 10.0.17763, cmd.exe (CP850)

Run any Node.js version

ehmicky — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 13:06:52 +0000

nve is a library that executes a file, command or REPL using a specific Node.js version.

Unlike nvm run it:

is 10 times faster
does not need a separate installation step for each Node version
works on Windows
does not require Bash
is installed as a Node module (as opposed to a Bash installation script downloaded with curl)

# Same as `node` but with Node 12
$ nve 12
Welcome to Node.js v12.8.0.
Type ".help" for more information.
> .exit

# Same as `node file.js` but with Node 8
$ nve 8 file.js

# Any Node CLI flag can be used
$ nve 8 --print 'process.version'
v8.16.0

🤖 Repeat tests. Repeat tests. Repeat tests.

ehmicky — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 14:03:23 +0000

test-each is a Node.js library to repeat tests using different inputs (Data-Driven Testing):

test runner independent: works with your current setup
generates test titles that are descriptive, unique, for any JavaScript type (not just JSON)
loops over every possible combination of inputs (cartesian product)
can use random functions (fuzz testing)
snapshot testing friendly

Gulp.js command execution for humans.

ehmicky — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 13:32:51 +0000

Build automation in JavaScript has gotten too complicated. It's time to bring it back to simple terminal commands executed in order, using Gulp-execa.

As opposed to similar plugins or to child_process.exec(), this uses execa which provides:

Better Windows support, including shebangs
Faster and more secure commands, since no shell is used by default
Execution of locally installed binaries
Interleaved stdout/stderr

gulp-execa adds Gulp-specific features to execa including:

Commands can be executed either directly or inside a files stream. In streaming mode, unlike other libraries:

commands are run in parallel, not serially
output can be saved either in files or in variables

Example gulpfile.js:

const { src, dest } = require('gulp')
const { task, exec, stream } = require('gulp-execa')

module.exports.audit = task('npm audit')

module.exports.outdated = async () => {
  await exec('npm outdated')
}

module.exports.sort = () =>
  src('*.txt')
    .pipe(stream(({ path }) => `sort ${path}`))
    .pipe(dest('sorted'))

The full documentation is available on GitHub.

Wrap a JavaScript function without changing its name/properties (by sindresorhus)

ehmicky — Wed, 19 Jun 2019 14:32:53 +0000

Wrapping a JavaScript function is not as simple as one might think. Some of the issues you might encounter include:

keeping the original function name
keeping the original function static properties and inherited properties
showing the original function's body when using String(function)

mimic-fn is a small utility by sindresorhus tackling this issue.

https://github.com/sindresorhus/mimic-fn

Tools for writing cross-platform Node.js

ehmicky — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 14:25:37 +0000

Cross-platform Node.js is important: according to the 2018 Node.js user survey, 24% of Node.js developers use Windows locally and 41% use Mac. In production 85% use Linux and 1% use BSD.

If you'd like to make your code more cross-platform, check out the following list of resources!

https://github.com/bcoe/awesome-cross-platform-nodejs

Show some 🖤 to Node.js process errors

ehmicky — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 14:04:11 +0000

Node.js prints process errors (uncaughtException, warning, unhandledRejection, rejectionHandled) on the console which is very useful. Unfortunately those errors:

do not show stack traces for warning and rejectionHandled making them hard to debug.
do not include multipleResolves errors (when a promise is resolved/rejected twice).
are inconvenient to log to an external service.
are hard to test.
cannot be conditionally skipped.
are printed each time an error is repeated (except for warning).
are not human-friendly.

I have created a library that fixes all those issues: log-process-errors.

Feel free to check it out at https://github.com/ehmicky/log-process-errors. Any feedback is welcome!

Swiss Army knife for Unix permissions

ehmicky — Wed, 30 Jan 2019 18:10:06 +0000

Unix file permissions can take many shapes: symbolic (ug+rw), octal (660) or a list of characters (drw-rw----).

unix-permissions (https://github.com/ehmicky/unix-permissions) enables using any of these (instead of being limited to a single one) with any Node.js or CLI command.

This library can also perform operations on Unix permissions such as:

testing, setting and unsetting. Using bitwise operations (|, &, ^, ~) can be tedious and error-prone otherwise.
validating syntax.
normalizing. For example u+r,u+w can be shortened to u+rw.
inverting. For example a umask of 117 means new files will be created with 661 permissions.
checking the minimal or maximal permissions among a list of them. This can be useful to aggregate all the permissions of several files, e.g. during a directory recursion.

Feel free to provide me with feedback on dev.to or on GitHub!

Cross-platform Node.js guide

ehmicky — Mon, 21 Jan 2019 14:15:57 +0000

Writing Node.js code that works on Windows, Mac and Linux can be tricky. There are only few guides that cover this topic thoroughly so I decided to share my own experience gathered over the years: https://github.com/ehmicky/cross-platform-node-guide