Productive with the Terminal

When I’m working on a long-running project, It’s not unusual to be working in a specific area of the code base for a while. Being productive with the terminal and take time to set up terminal automation may save a lot of time in the long run.

In this post I will show some of my techniques I do to be more productive. I will be using PowerShell on Windows Terminal in this example.

Imagine we are focusing the upcoming months in an area involving the following:

A MSSQL database
An .NET Core API
A React SPA frontend
A normal morning would include:

A normal morning could like something like:

Turn on computer.
Login
Start PowerShell
Cd to git repositories for what I’m working on
Git fetch/pull/rebase to make sure I have the latest code
Start Build + Start IDE’s + Run
Open up available MR’s/PR’s
Open up the issue management system for example JIRA
Open up the chat

That’s quite a lot of manual steps.

Let’s look at how we can automate that.

In PowerShell, you can add global functions to your profile.

Open up PowerShell and edit $PROFILE, for example code $PROFILE
Add a function called Good-Morning

function Good-Morning {
}

Step, 3-6 (cd repo, get the latest code, build code, start IDE, run code)

function Good-Morning {
    Morning-Frontend
    Morning-Backend
    Morning-Database
};
function Morning-Frontend {
    wt.exe PowerShell.exe, "-NoExit", "-Command",
    "& {
        Push-Location C:\git-frontend-project \;
        git pull \;
        npm install \;
        code . \;
        npm start \;
    }"
}
function Morning-Backend {
    wt.exe PowerShell.exe, "-NoExit", "-Command",
    "& {
        Push-Location C:\git-backend-project \;
        git pull \;
        dotnet build \;
        start your-solution-file \;
        dotnet watch run your-cs-proj
    }"
}
function Morning-Database {
    wt.exe PowerShell.exe, "-NoExit", "-Command",
    "& {
        Push-Location C:\git-database-project \;
        git pull \;
        docker build -t database . && docker run -it database
       }"
}

Ok great! Now that we have that out of the way, the rest of the steps will be easy.

Step 7 and 8. Accessing MR/PR’s on github.com and JIRA with chrome.

chrome.exe "https://github.com" "https://jira.com"

Step 9. Accessing Chat, lets say we use Slack. We bind and access the environment variable.

slack

That pretty much it, now we have the following morning routine:

Turn on computer.
Login
Start PowerShell
Good-Morning

And when we feel comfortable, we can add it to start-up resulting in:

Turn on computer.
Login

Full script below:

function Good-Morning {
    Morning-Frontend
    Morning-Backend
    Morning-Database
    chrome.exe "https://github.com" "https://jira.com"
    slack
};

# New Terminal, latest code, build npm, open code, run
function Morning-Frontend {
    wt.exe PowerShell.exe, "-NoExit", "-Command",
    "& {
        Push-Location C:\git-database-project \;
        git pull \;
        npm install \;
        code . \;
        npm start \;
    }"
}

# New Terminal, latest code, build dotnet, open rider, run
function Morning-Backend {
    wt.exe PowerShell.exe, "-NoExit", "-Command",
    "& {
        Push-Location C:\git-database-project \;
        git pull \;
        dotnet build \;
        start your-solution-file \;
        dotnet watch run your-cs-proj
    }"
}

# New Terminal, latest code, build dockerfile and run
function Morning-Database {
    wt.exe PowerShell.exe, "-NoExit", "-Command",
    "& {
        Push-Location C:\git-database-project \;
        git pull \;
        docker build -t database . && docker run -it database
       }"
}

Happy Coding!

Rasmus Olsson

Productive with the Terminal