[IPS Marketplace] Invision Development Helper (CUI)

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Invision Development Helper (IDH)

Invision Development Helper is a command line utility designed to aid third-party IPS developers in their everyday workflow.

It is a direct continuation of the previous Power Tools command line script, and is still in its early alpha stages with limited functionality.

Source: https://dev.taiga.sh/ips/invision-dev-helper

IMPORTANT: THIS TOOL IS FOR USE ON LOCAL DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENTS ONLY. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE SHOULD ANY OF THE PROVIDED TOOLS BE USED ON A PRODUCTION SERVER.

THIS IS ADDITIONALLY ALPHA SOFTWARE. PLEASE USE WITH CAUTION AND MAINTAIN BACKUPS.

Installation

First, make sure you have installed the included Invision Development Helper.xml plugin onto your development site.

If you are on Linux, you can copy the idh executable to /usr/local/bin for convenience.

Otherwise, just extract the included idh file to the directory of your IPS installation and run it from there.

If the script is not being run while you are currently in your IPS installation root, you must set the path to your IPS installation in the IDH_PATH environment variable.

Features

As noted above, this is an early alpha project and has limited functionality.

Application management

IDH includes a dedicated CUI allowing you to manage various aspects of your application from the commandline.

From here, you can

• View application information
• Build your application for release (more information below)
• Rebuild the application
• Build a new application version
• Enable/disable problem applications remotely

Build for release

The “build for release” function does all of the following things for you at once:

• Creates a new builds directory for you, which is organized by your applications long_version
• Rebuilds the application
• Builds and copies the applications PHAR archive, making sure to exclude tests, screenshots, and other undesirable folders
• Compiles and zips any documentation and license files (README.md, README.html, LICENSE.txt, …)
• Compiles all development resources
• Copies over screenshotos in the screenshots folder (if available)

This way, everything is bundled up and ready to be directly uploaded to the marketplace. No having to manually copy or move things around, everything is sorted and compiled for you in an instant.

Proxy classes

Just as the old Power Tools application did, IDH provides the ability to generate “proxy” classes used to help your IDE properly resolve IPS’ monkey-patched classes.

Even better, it can parse database schema files and automatically assign them as properties to their associated classes!

Future features

There are various additional features planned for this application, but I do not have any timelines or guarantees on when they will be implemented.

Some of these features include:

• Plugins CUI management interface
• Re-introduction Power Tools’ “tinker” command
• Acceptance test helpers
• Class generators
• Setting page generators

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