REPL

flecks provides @flecks/repl to make it easy to run a REPL inside your running application. @flecks/repl provides a command to easily connect to your application.

Prerequisites

In order to use it you will need to have socat.

Play with a REPL

Let's create an application to test the REPL:

npm

npm init @flecks/app repl-test

npm

npx flecks add -d @flecks/repl

Start your application:

npm

npm run start

It will just sit there. Open another terminal in the project directory and run the command:

npm

npx flecks repl

tip

For a more ergonomic experience, you may invoke:

npm

npx flecks repl -r

If you have rlwrap installed.

You will be greeted with a prompt:

repl-test>

That's our application ID! We can run commands:

repl-test> flecks.get('@flecks/core')
{ id: 'repl-test' }

Confirm we're actually in our application by killing it:

repl-test> process.exit(0)

That will kick us back out to the terminal. If we try to run the command again, we'll get an error that looks something like this:

[...] socat[...] E connect(5, AF=1 "/tmp/flecks/repl-test/repl/repl-test-[...].sock", 57): Connection refused

This is because there's no application to connect to anymore.

Extend the REPL

Your flecks can implement @flecks/repl.commands and/or @flecks/repl.context to add context or commands to the REPL.

For instance, @flecks/passport-local implements a command to easily create a user account in the REPL.