Node Modules - Will Anderson

I’ve written a number of few Node.js modules for performing basic tasks. Most are CLI modules that are intended to be installed with the -g flag.

web-server-cli

I frequently find myself wanting to statically serve a folder on my machine for debugging purposes. Having to configure Apache/nginx/IIS to serve the folder is usually more effort than I want to go through. web-server-cli solves this by spinning up a static Express server in the current folder.

$ web-server
Static server started at http://localhost:8000/

There are configuration options for the root directory and the port. They’re documented on the web-server-cli package page.

nodeignore

I spin up a lot of new git repositories in my day-to-day work, so I frequently need to configure .gitignore files. GitHub has a great .gitignore repo with configurations for various languages and frameworks. Unfortunately, it can still be a hassle to navigate to the repo, find the language I want, and copy the contents into a local .gitignore file. That’s where nodeignore comes in.

$ nodeignore
Downloading gitignore to .gitignore
Finished downloading .gitignore

By default, nodeignore downloads the Node.js .gitignore file (thus the name). You can download any .gitignore definition in the github/gitignore repo with the ‑l parameter.

nodeignore -l VisualStudio

There are also configuration options for appending/replacing existing .gitignore files. Full instructions for configuration options are listed on the nodeignore package page.

Unfortunately there’s no support yet for downloading the “global” gitignore files, but it’s a planned feature.

Placeholder Images

There are a number of services that provide an API for generating placeholder images with specific dimensions. These are great for hotlinking into website designs, but if you need to download a bunch of different resolutions, the process becomes more tedious. That’s why I created npm packages for downloading placeholder images from the CLI.

For starters, there’s a package that contains the generic logic for downloading images from a placeholder website: placebase.

There are a number of websites that provide placeholder images. The following packages harness “placebase” to download images from their respective websites.

Each module has basically the same configuration settings. Eventually I’ll also add flags for downloading grayscale images etc.