Different formatters for different environments

[marlondecol]

Description

It would be useful to support different formatters depending on the selected environment. For example, using the default formatter for development and shfmt --minify for production.

Even a simpler option, such as enabling minification of the generated script when building for production, would already be very helpful.

Apologies if this is already possible, but I couldn’t find a way. I tried a few approaches, like setting formatter to run a script that invokes different formatter commands based on the BASHLY_ENV environment variable, but I wasn’t able to make it work.

[DannyBen]

Yes, I can see the need for this.

For the time being, it is not intentionally implemented, but there is a workaround.

The settings file is parsed for ERB, and has access to the Bashly ruby namespace.
So, this will work:

# settings.yml
formatter: <%= Bashly::Settings.production? ? 'shfmt --minify' : 'shfmt' %>

I know it is not pretty, and I prefer to avoid telling people to use ERB in YAML, but for the time being, this is the cleanest way I could find.

Another workaround, is to have two settings.files for development and production, and set the BASHLY_SETTINGS_PATH env var accordingly.

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I am wondering what would be a good implementation for this. Perhaps we should allow certain settings keys to accept an "environment hash" as an alternative value syntax? Like:

formatter:
  production: shfmt --minify
  development: shfmt

Additional candidate options: target_dir, strict, show_examples_on_error.

Not sure this is the right implementation, but it is the first thing that came to mind.

[DannyBen]

Started a discussion in #665 - if you have any opinion on the possible solution.

[marlondecol]

@DannyBen thanks for the feedback! I’ll stick with your workaround until we have a solution.

[DannyBen]

Released in 1.3.3.