ez-command

Motivation

When troubleshooting differents environments at the same time I found myself having multiple terminal tabs (with each tab splitted up to 4 terminal) for SSH tunneling, TCP redirections and diagnostic commands among others. Each environment could have been running in a different deployment (say k8s or plain instances) and felt like the cognitive load to switch, add or toggle any of these "groups" of terminals was way too much. I have a really bad memory and wanted something that could help me remember the little tiny details while at the same time being interactive for the user.

Install

You can use npx (npx ez-command -c config.json) or install it globally npm i ez-command -g

Usage

Throughout configuration you will be able to define the name, the command to be executed and a URL property (optional). The URL column is not detected automatically, it's meant to be an easy shortcut (CTRL+click) to open a URLs from the list. The configuration can follow two different formats: groups of commands or a plain list.

Using groups

If you want to define separate certain commands from others groups will be useful. An example of a configuration file using groups would look like as follows:

{
  "groups": [
    {
      "name": "first group",
      "items": [
        {
          "name": "item1 - group 1",
          "command": "ls"
        }
      ]
    }, {
      "name": "second group",
      "items": [
        {
          "name": "item1 - group 2",
          "command": "ps aux"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Using a plain list

If you're not interested in separating different groups of commands you can provide a configuration similar to the following:

[
  {
    "name": "first item",
    "command": "ls"
  }, {
    "name": "second item",
    "command": "printenv"
  }
]

Examples

You can browse the examples directory to see some configurations.

Customization

The theme by default is green but you can tweak and provide your own customized theme by running:

$ ez-command --theme path/to/your/theme -c config.json

ez-command is also built to support multiple layouts like the logs container displayed on the right, or the bottom. To use such layouts you can specify ez-command --layout "number" where number can be one of the described layouts below:

Layout number	description
1	item list to the left and logs to the right
2	item list to the right and logs to the left
3	item list to the top left and logs on the bottom half

Author

Alejandro Oviedo <[email protected]>