The goal of node-wrapper is to bootstrap development environments based on node.js build tools such as grunt or brunch. Inspired by gradlew.

node-wrapper is an executable that behaves as your build tool of choice (e.g. brunch, grunt) but it will also download node.js and install the build tool if they weren't already installed.

The Importance of Bootstrapping

Hacking on a project shouldn't involve following long installing instructions. Any instruction, any single setup step should be automatized in a script. The script becomes your instructions.

While tools such as grunt or brunch allow to automate everything, developers still have to install node.js and the build tool of choice. With node-wrapper you don't need to install any of them: it will check if the tool is available, otherwise it will download it along with node.js if necessary.

For a better explanation about how good bootstrapping is, check Zach's Unsucking Your Team's Development Environment presentation.

Getting started

The easiest way of getting started is to copy node-wrapper and node-wrapper.bat to your project root folder where your build or configuration scripts are. Then rename them to match your tool of choice.

For example, if you wanted to use brunch, copy node-wrapper and node-wrapper.bat to your project and rename them to brunch and brunch.bat respectively. It's important to copy both scripts to have both Unix and Windows developers happy. Once the files are copied, you can execute them as a replacement of the original brunch tool: it will check if the tool is available, if not, it will download it and execute it along with the parameters passed.

You can also keep the original name of the scripts, node-wrapper, and pass the tool name as first argument:

> ./node-wrapper brunch build

Windows caveat

The Windows version, node-wrapper.bat, needs to download and unzip npm, therefore I had to use 7za.exe since it doesn't seem to exist an uniform way of unzipping files in Windows. Copy 7za.exe along with node-wrapper.bat if you use node-wrapper in Windows (BTW any Windows hacker knowing how to fix this unwanted dependency?).

Mingw users use the shell script. Mingw's terminal cannot launch Windows batch files.