Scripted Server Startup for MDN and WPT

A sizeable chunk of my work at Igalia so far involves editing and updating the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), and a smaller chunk has me working on the Web Platform Tests (WPT).  In both cases, the content is stored in large public repositories (MDN, WPT) and contributors are encouraged to fork the repositories, clone them locally, and push updates via the fork as PRs (Pull Requests).  And while both repositories roll in localhost web server setups so you can preview your edits locally, each has its own.

As useful as these are, if you ignore the whole “auto-force a browser page reload every time the file is modified in any way whatsoever” thing that I’ve been trying very hard to keep from discouraging me from saving often, each has to be started in its own way, from within their respective repository directories, and it’s generally a lot more convenient to do so in a separate Terminal window.

I was getting tired of constantly opening a new Terminal window, cding into the correct place, remembering the exact invocation needed to launch the local server, and on and on, so I decided to make my life slightly easier with a few short scripts and aliases.  Maybe this will be useful to you as well.

First, I decided to keep things relatively simple.  Instead of writing a small program that would handle all server startups by parsing shell arguments and what have you, I wrote a couple of very similar shell scripts.  Here’s the script for launching MDN’s localhost:

#!/bin/bash
cd ~/repos/mdn/content/
yarn start

Then I added an alias to ~/.bashrc which employs a technique I swiped from this Stack Overflow answer.

alias mdn-server="open -a Terminal.app ~/bin/mdn-start.bsh"

Translated into English, that means “open the file ~/bin/mdn-start.bsh using the -application Terminal.app”.

Thus, when I type mdn-server in any command prompt, a new Terminal window will open and the shell script mdn-start.bsh will be run; the script switches into the needed directory and launches the localhost server using yarn, as per the MDN instructions.  What’s more, when I’m done working on MDN, I can switch to the window running the server, stop the server with ⌃C (control-C), and the Terminal window closes automatically.

I did something very similar for WPT, except in this case the alias reads:

alias wpt-server="open -a Terminal.app ~/bin/wpt-serve.bsh"

And the script to which it points reads:

#!/bin/bash
cd ~/repos/wpt/
./wpt serve

As I mentioned before, I chose to do it this way rather than writing a single alias (say, local-server) that would accept arguments (mdn, wpt, etc.) and fire off scripts accordingly, but that’s also an option and a viable one at that.

So that’s my little QoL (Quality of Life) upgrade to make working on MDN and WPT a little easier.  I hope it helps you in some way!

• Scripted Server Startup for MDN and WPT was published on Friday, April 16th, 2021.
• It was assigned to the Mac and Tools categories.
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