[CLOSED] Support for Nave (node virtualenv)

[core-ai-bot]

Issue by airtonix
Thursday Dec 26, 2013 at 15:28 GMT
Originally opened as adobe/brackets#6323

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Yes nodejs still needs virtualenv. Because six months from now I'll revisit a project on an older version of NodeJS (and all the packages that work on that version of nodejs) and I'll wish I hade Nave.

So if you want brackets to be a thing that nodejs people use, it would be very nice to be able have projects execute some sort of subshell, allowing me to put in there:

nave use 0.11.8 $project_name

I know a lot of nodejs people seem to think they don't need virtualenv "because npm installs packages locally"

Except that you don't get the handy binaries that some packages provide unless you use -g which you can't use on linux because it then tries to install it to a root own directory (which then defeats the purpose of sandboxing all your packages per project per node version).

Sigh why does this concept feel so hard to explain to people who should know better?

Don't mind me, i'll go back to using gnome-terminal, nave and sublime-text

[core-ai-bot]

Comment by peterflynn
Sunday Dec 29, 2013 at 05:54 GMT

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@airtonix I'm a little unclear what you're asking for. Brackets doesn't invoke npm or otherwise touch the user's Node setup (or even launch the user's Node server), so I'm not sure why Brackets itself would need specific support for you to use Nave. Or put another way, what is it about Brackets that prevents you from using Nave or virtualenv?

If it's just a matter to wanting to run shell commands from within Brackets (without switching to a separate terminal app), you might want to check out the Brackets Terminal extension.

If I've completely missed what you're asking for, please let me know. Would be interested in understanding more about your workflow...

[core-ai-bot]

Comment by airtonix
Sunday Dec 29, 2013 at 06:20 GMT

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Ok lets get some basics out of the way first since you seem to be confused about nave or why i even mentioned virtualenv (maybe you've never used either of them)

Current version of Brackets has in its debug menu:

• Enable Node Debugger
• Log Node state to console
• Restart Node

1. Do you understand and appreciate the need to sandboxed language environments (like python has virtualenv)?
2. do you acknowledge that nodejs has more than one version?
3. do you acknowledge that the majority of people will work on more than one project during their natural life?
4. do you acknowledge that nodejs comes out with new versions quite frequently?
5. do you acknowledge that of the projects people will work on, that the likely-hood of nodejs being the same version is extremely low?

Personally, I have done very little NodeJs work. But already I have had to run projects from at least two different versions of node.

NodeJs community likes to think they don't need a tool like virtualenv, nave or nvm. Maybe they only work on one project their entire life and die happy? who knows?

So now that we have established that Brackets has some form of NodeJS integration and that any development on it makes some incredibly broad assumptions as to what version of NodeJS that is, let us now examine how Brackets can make this integration more than just a slapped on feature:

• I should be able to either specify where my nodejs interpretor,
• even better: be provided a text area that is treated like a shell script (I personally would be putting nave use 0.9.4 projectname) that would cause all nodeJS interactions to be restricted to the nodejs binaries and node_modules in that environ (~/.nave/0.9.4/bin/nodejs && ~/.nave/0.9.4/projectname/node_modules/)

[core-ai-bot]

Comment by peterflynn
Sunday Dec 29, 2013 at 07:52 GMT

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@airtonix Apologies for the confusion, but the Debug menu in Brackets is solely for the purposes of debugging Brackets itself (for use by extension developers). Those menu items are not part of any general-purpose NodeJS integration -- Brackets internally uses a copy of Node for certain operations, and that's the only thing the Debug menu applies to. Eventually we'll probably have this menu hidden by default. Maybe we should have started hiding it already -- you're certainly not the first person to find it confusing :-(

I'll close this for now since the issue is predicated on features that Brackets doesn't actually have. But since you've clearly thought a bunch about what Node integration in a tool like Brackets should look like, feel free to start a brackets-dev newsgroup post about this. There could well be a Node integration extension for Brackets in the future (or even core functionality), so it would be an interesting discussion to have even if the features aren't there yet.

[core-ai-bot]

Comment by airtonix
Sunday Dec 29, 2013 at 07:54 GMT

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Some people in the #nodejs freenode channel have pointed out that I look like entitled asshole, thats cool. they're entitled to their opinions and they're probably also right.

I think this kind of thing happens when you make such a compelling product and it fails to deliver on the climax as they say. :p

@peterflynn sure no problems.

[core-ai-bot]

Comment by peterflynn
Sunday Dec 29, 2013 at 22:56 GMT

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@airtonix Not sure if your "fails to deliver" is intended to refer to Brackets or to Node itself -- but if you feel like Brackets is getting in the way of your NodeJS development workflow, please let us know what obstacles you're hitting or what you think should be different. We're always open to feedback.