Explanation

In other language eco-systems like Go or Node, the package management tools also provide a means for installing and running a program (and not just downloading a dependecy). I couldn't really find something like that for the Julia world so I wrote this script.

The basic idea is simple. If you want to run script foo inside package Bar, you would invoke that with:

$ jlrun Bar/foo <arguments passed to **foo**>

This will look for a file called ./scripts/foo.jl in the Bar package. If you leave the script name off, the default script name is run (e.g., ./scripts/run.jl).

NB: There is a larger effort, associated with the julia executable itself, to enable very similar functionality as described in this pull rquest. If this were to be merged, much of this would be unnecessary.

Installation

Typically this script is installed as either jlrun.jl or jlrun. It should be given the executable permission and placed somewhere in your PATH. Note, this script only needs to be installed in your path. It can be named whatever you want although jlrun.jl or just jlrun are what I tested it with.

Usage

As mentioned previous, the script usage is as follows:

$ jlrun <package>[/<script>] ...

...where <package> name is a Julia package installed in the current environment and <script> is an optional script name to run (by default, the run script is used if no script is specified). The ... represents any additional command line arguments which will be passed to the underlying script.

Function

When invoked, jlrun find the location of the specified <package> in the current environment. It then looks for a scripts directory in that package and expects to find a file named <script>.jl in that directory. It then runs that scripts and appends the additional command line arguments (e.g., ...).

Note that the script itself is run under the environment of that package. This means it should have access to all dependencies specified by that package (and only those dependencies).

Example

$ jlrun Runlit --size 10

This will run the ./scripts/run.jl script found in the Runlit package and using the command line arguments --size 10.

$ jlrun Runlit/alt

This will run the scripts/alt.jl script found in the Runlit package but without any command line arguments.

NB: The Runlit package, which provides a CLI based way of running Literate.jl, is designed to work with jlrun.