POC Builder

About

POC Builder is a project that I created that I use for creating proof of concept applications. Very often, when experimenting with new libraries, APIs, functions and languages, I create a separate, smaller example script to experiment with to get a feel for how it works.

When creating a new project, POC Builder will create a project in the preset directory (POC_DIR variable) and turn it into a git repository.

POC Builder is written by Spike Grobstein ([email protected] ; http://spike.grobste.in) and licensed under the MIT License. You can use and modify it to your hearts content.

Usage

poc <action> <project_name> [ <params> ... ]

Available actions:

• create: creates a new POC project and initializes as a new git repository. params are files that are to be created in that directory; they will be added to the git repo and committed as part of the initial import.
• edit: open the specified project in POC_EDITOR (defaults to mate). params are ignored.
• go: cd to the specified project directory. params are ignored.
• list: list all available POC projects in the projects directory. params are passed as options to the ls command.

POC Builder will attempt to cd into the project's directory when working with a project (create, mate, go). Because of limitations of the BASH shell, a sub-process cannot change the working directory of its parent process. To work around this, you can "source" the poc script by doing the following in an active shell session:

. path/to/poc create some_project

The following environment variables will affect behavior of POC Builder

• POC_DIR: the directory for your POCs
• POC_EDITOR: the editor for the edit command

Since always typing the dot and full path can be a pain, you can alias it in your .bashrc file. This is also a good place to configure its environment variables for custom installs:

export POC_DIR="~/projects/poc"
export POC_EDITOR="mate"

alias poc=". path/to/poc"

and then you can call poc directly from the commandline.

Examples

Get a list of all POC Projects

This will list all projects using your default ls options:

poc list

This will list all POC projects and their contents in list form:

poc list -Rl

Create a new POC Project

This will create a new project directory called python_open_file and initialize a fresh git repository:

poc create python_open_file

This will create a new project directory called python_open_file, create 2 empty files called open_file.py and README, create a fresh git repository, add those files to the repository and commit:

poc create python_open_file open_file.py README

Go to an existing project

This will cd into an existing project directory:

poc go python_open_file

Open a project in textmate

This will open the existing POC project python_open_file in POC_EDITOR:

poc edit python_open_file