Vendure CLI commands for build/testing + JSON-config (similar to what angular.json is)

[KariNarhi28]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Currently Vendure (+ Admin UI) build and testing steps require custom scripts.

For example with build, compiling Typescript files and then copying assets into the dist-folder, or using the populate-function script for test-data when testing.

This is error-prone and can be time-consuming if you don't have a pre-existing template to work with.

Describe the solution you'd like

Built-in CLI commands for npx vendure to build and test the Vendure API + Admin UI based on a configuration JSON-file, similar to how Angular handles CLI with angular.json.

Here are some pseudo-examples:

• vendure build
  • Build the API into a dist-folder and copy assets (dist-folder and asset-paths configured in the JSON-file)
  • Also could handle multiple env-files by using the configurations-map of environment-configurations with the fileReplacements-technique that angular.json also has.
• vendure test
  • Supposing that Vendure could have a pre-defined testing setup with Jest and Cypress?
• vendure populate
  • This would populate the DB and could take 3 different options:
    • --csv pointing to a CSV-file containing the products-data.
    • --initial-data, pointing to a Typescript -file containing the initialData-object.
    • The 2 options above could be mandatory with each other, or if other is not provided, then the missing data would be from the test-data.
    • Alternatively, --test which would use the test-data from:
      • @vendure/create/assets/products.csv
      • @vendure/create/assets/initial-data.json
    • If all 3 would be provided, then the --csv and --initial-data options would take priority over --test.

Describe alternatives you've considered
An up-to-date and clear step-by-step guide in the docs for setting up production-ready configurations for these processes.

For comparison, Cloud Run example from Pinelab which is linked in the docs, seems a bit dated and abandoned, newest change was a README update 2 months ago, earlier commits from last year, so clearly not the latest Vendure-stuff included in there.

Additional context
Currently I have 6 scripts to produce a dist-folder with compiled Typescript and assets and 2 scripts for db-population and 1 for testing:

    "copy-admin-ui-dist": "npx copyfiles -u 1 'src/__admin-ui/dist/**/*' dist",
    "copy-admin-ui-images": "npx copyfiles -u 2 'src/admin-ui/images/**/*' dist/admin-ui",
    "copy-translations": "npx copyfiles -u 1 'src/translations/*' dist",
    "copy-assets": "npm run copy-admin-ui-images && npm run copy-translations",
    "build": "rimraf dist && tsc && npm run copy-admin-ui-dist && npm run copy-assets",
    "build:admin": "rimraf ./src/__admin-ui && ts-node src/admin-ui/compile-admin-ui.ts",
    "populate-db": "ts-node ./src/utils/populate-db.ts",
    "populate-test-data": "ts-node ./src/utils/populate-test-data.ts",
    "test": "jest --preset=\"ts-jest\""

Sure, I could put the assets into one folder (as I probably will), but the issue is there that I have to copy the assets to the tsc-generated dist-folder, since tsc does not recognize other files than .ts or .tsx.

And also that I need to have custom Typescript-scripts using the Vendure-libraries for the db-population, instead of just providing the datafiles for a CLI command.

[moussaab-moulim]

does your pouplate db script support external asset server ?

[KariNarhi28]

does your pouplate db script support external asset server ?

Don't think so, it's pretty much the same script that is shown on Vendure docs:
https://docs.vendure.io/guides/developer-guide/importing-data/#the-populate-function

Haven't really studied the importing-related stuff since our use-case is that users add the product-materials manually by themselves.

[michaelbromley]

We do have plans to expand the scope of the CLI to cover more of the dev experience like building and testing. Right now we are in the early planning stages.