Developer Environments
Every project you work on needs different tools with different versions. Installing those tools globally makes no sense and could even cause subtle bugs during dev.
tea can determine the tools a project directory needs based on the files it finds. With our shell magic just step into the project directory and type commands; tea automatically fetches the specific versions those projects need and runs them.
We try to be as clever as possible, eg. we parse the node version out of a GitHub Action’s
action.yml. If we see a .node-version file, we add that version of node to the environment. We want to support everything that makes sense (your PRs are very welcome!)Where there isn’t a convention for specifying tool versions, you can add YAML front matter to its configuration file. For example, if we’re talking a python poetry project, then you can specify your python version by adding YAML front matter to its
pyproject.toml:$ cat <<EoYAML >> pyproject.toml
# ---
# dependencies:
# python.org: ^3.11.3
# ---
EoYAML
If your poetry project needs other non pypa dependencies (like a c compiler) then you can add them there too (eg.
llvm.org, our deps are always named after project homepages because then you just google it and there’s no ambiguity).If you prefer we also support extracting your deps from a markdown table under a
# Dependencies section in your README.md:$ cat <<EOF >>my-project/README.md
# Dependencies
| Project | Version |
| ---------- | ------- |
| go.dev | ^1 |
EOF
Using your
README is kinda neat; it makes this data both machine and human readable.Finally, you can just use
tea.yaml (or .tea.yaml) if you like.Docker is great for deployment and cross compilation, but… let’s face it: it sucks for dev.
Docker stifles builders. It constricts you; you’re immalleable; tech marches onwards but your docker container remains immobile. Nobody knows how to use
docker. Once that Dockerfile is set up, nobody dares touch it.And let’s face it, getting your personal dev and debug tools working inside that image is incredibly frustrating. Why limit your potential?
Keep deploying with Docker, but use tea to develop.
Then when you do deploy you may as well install those deps with tea.
Frankly, tea is properly versioned (unlike system packagers) so with tea your deployments actually remain more stable.
We still need to do a bit of work here. We don’t install any packages when you step into a directory as that would violate the principle of least surprise. But this may mean the full environment doesn’t work initially. You can fix this with a
tea -SE && cd .. We’re working on improving this.There are all sorts of variables a developer needs when working on a project and tea aims to make them available to you. Thus we provide
SRCROOT and VERSION‡ in addition to everything else required to make your devenv function. To see the full environment for your project run tea -En or simply env.‡ extracted from theREADME.mdorVERSIONfiles.
package.jsondeno.json,deno.jsoncpyproject.toml,pipfile,requirements.txtgo.modVERSION.node-versioncargo.tomlGemfiletea.yaml,.tea.ymlREADME.md.envrc
- After changing any files you need to do a
cd .to reload the environment. - While debugging you can do
tea -Eto see if we’re picking up your changes.
Last modified 7d ago