The Dude

The Dude is here to make your terminal life more chilled.

You preload The Dude with your commonly used commands. Then you run them. Alternatively, The Dude already knows how to do a bunch of stuff for you.

For example:

$ dude fetch google.co.uk # opens a google.co.uk in lynx
$ dude show me pictures of cool stuff # opens a browser with a google images search for 'cool stuff'
$ dude wassup # starts top

By giving a high-level interface to the command line, The Dude can make it easier, particularly for the less command-line savvy, to get some of the power of the command-line without all of the learning curve.

By combining Ruby and the shell, The Dude can make it very easy to write complicated and powerful scripts. Even for those with high levels of command-line fu, obscure or often forgotten commands can be given high-level aliases making them easier to remember.

For example, imagine you have a remote web server containing log files that occasionally need to be searched in a particular way if there is a problem.

So this would involve, ssh-ing into the server, navigating to the logs folder and grep through the appropriate log file. None of these are particularly tricky however there are plenty of opportunities to get bogged down such as forgetting paths, grep options etc.

With The Dude you can easily setup a command to do this.

command /search web logs for (.+)/ do |term|
  path = '/path/to/access.log'
  Net::SSH.start 'production.server', 'user' do |ssh|
    ssh.exec! "grep #{term} #{path}"
  end
end

After which you can simply type

$ dude search web logs for something

You can also call other dude commands. For example if we now wanted to list page not found errors we could add the command

command 'list not found' do
  ask 'search web logs for 404'
end

Then call it with

$ dude list not found

Whilst this can be handy (and kinda fun) for those who are comfortable on the command line, its real benefit is to allow command-line savvy developers to enable other members of their team to perform specific tasks without having to remember complicated command line options and flags.

You can install TheDude using

$ gem install the_dude

The Dude comes with a 'dude' binary so you can use this to run commands

$ dude why? # will output 'because'

Alternatively, you can start the dude interactively with

$ dude -i

Then you get a dude prompt with history that you can enter commands straight into.

To add your own commands, create a file in your home folder called .duderc . Then you can use The Dude DSL to create commands. Some basic commands look like

# dude hello world
command 'hello world', 'whatever man'

# open google search results in a browser
command /google (.*)/, ->(query){ `open "https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=#{query}"` }

You can list all available dude commands with

$ dude list commands

For a full list of all configured commands, variables and plugins use

$ dude what you got

You can install plugins for TheDude that contain additional commands or add additional functionality. Plugins are bundled as gems. For example to install the trello plugin simply use

$ gem install the_dude-trello

After setting your Trello authentication details, you will then be able to use the commands defined in the Trello plugin as well as use them to build your own commands.

command /find (\S+) on ideas board/ do |text|
  ideas_board_id = 123 # Trello id of the ideas board
  ask "find #{text} on trello board #{ideas_board_id}"
end

will let you search across the titles of all cards on the board with the specified id.

$ dude find awesomeness on ideas board

Currently the following plugins are available

Web : Integrates Capybara and Nokogiri for easier web scripts

SSH : Integrates SSH

Trello : Connect to Trello boards, lists and cards.