Package inklecate as a dotnet tool #743

Closed NonlinearFruit closed 2 years ago

Publishing inklecate as a dotnet tool would have a lot of benefits:

It is easier to publish than uploading a Github release with dotnet pack and dotnet nuget push
- Incrementing the version number can be annoying to remember. But the repo already uses tags, so a tool linke MinVer would version the package automatically based on the closest tag
It is easier to install for cli users with dotnet tool install
It is easier for update for cli users with dotnet tool update

Testing

Here is how I tested this change:

dotnet pack
dotnet tool install -g inklecate --add-source inklecate/nupkg/
cd {ink script folder}
inklecate {my-script}.ink

This worked great on my machine (Win10). I also pushed the package to a private GitLab package repository and install the package in a linux dotnet container and it worked!

Use Case

In my particular use case, I wanted to setup a pipeline to compile my inks into json whenever I push. The problem is installing inklecate in linux is kinda a pain. I noticed that we were using .Net Core 3 so I wondered how hard it would be to convert this to a dotnet tool. Then I could use a dotnet linux container (mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/sdk) and:

dotnet tool install -g inklecate --add-source https://nuget.pkg.github.com/inkle/index.json
inklecate *.ink
{process the .ink.jsons}

Next Steps

This is just how I would go about fleshing out the pipeline:

[Optional] Use MinVer to autoversion off tags
- You can manually version via a csproj 'Version' property like I did here

Update travis to pack and push a nuget on certain events (eg: branch == master, tag events)

It would look something like this (I do this in GitLab and Github should be similar):

dotnet nuget add source https://nuget.pkg.github.com/inkle/index.json  --name github --username inkle --password {github read/write token} --store-password-in-clear-text
git fetch --tags # if using MinVer
dotnet pack --configuration Release --output .
dotnet nuget push *.nupkg --source github

inkle / ink