CLI Posts
In case you haven't noticed, I've been building a lot of SurrealDB tools lately. I'm a big proponent of having a deep toolbox that works for you. The old PHP frameworks had basically everything you needed and you could build pretty much anything with them. Node.js is slowly getting there will the SSR frameworks, but if you are using something new, like SurrealDB, there aren't a lot of options.
Everything I've been building isn't just for SurrealDB. I've also been building more generic Node.js tools too. My approach is to build some libraries that aren't NPM packages and don't have a lot of NPM dependencies. The idea is you can choose the libraries you want to use, put them in your project as a submodule, and either follow the projects' progress or just freeze it and use as is, or even make it into something more tailored to your project's needs. Here are some of the more generic ones, before I get into the ones I'm really excited about.
Node.js Process Manager
A simple library that can be used to manage your Node.js processes, like starting, stopping, restarting, or auto-starting a script. There's not a lot to it and it has very few NPM dependencies. If it expands much, it will likely be to add dependency management, so if your script requires another process, it will ensure that one is running too.
Quality Control Manager
This is a different approach than what I normally do and has the opportunity to really make managing a project easier. This is a bit broader than the process manager and wears several hats, but I think it's a needed tool. At its base, it's a documentation generator, but it's also much more. It uses AST to outline all of your code, then uses that to generate documentation, a code trace tree for each function, and usage examples. It has a built in server or it can output the files for use elsewhere. I also want to add tests generation, error checking, and quality analysis.
Others
I have some others, but I don't want to discuss those yet, as I don't have a clear vision for their potential implementations. Let's just say, I'm working on automating pretty much everything.
SurrealDB Tools
So this what I'm getting excited about.
Database Migrations
I've built a migration tool for SurrealDB. Not a big deal, right? Well it's pretty cool. It does the normal migration handling stuff, so you have a development server and a production server, and it allows you to sync your database schema, by using migration files. It also allows you to roll back migrations, either back to a specific migration, back to the beginning, or forward to a specific migration. The cool thing is you can allow it to inspect your database, you can then make whatever changes you want, then allow it to re-inspect your database and generate your new migrations for you. It compares the inspected database to the new, modified database, and builds the script to go from old to new on another server.
Database ORM
I've built a tool that can generate an ORM, based on your database schema. It's built on top of surrealdb.js, so it doesn't limit anything you can currently do, but then it provides some really cool shortcut features to make complex queries as easy as possible. It currently looks a lot like how you use Prisma, but without a lot of the corners Prisma tends to push you into. This thing really adds a lot of features and I plan to retool the generator to let you customize how the ORM works. So if you prefer chained queries, then it'll do chaining, if you prefer object queries, it'll do objects. It also uses your current database to generate the ORM, there's no schema file to deal with, like Prisma has.
SurrealDB Crucible
Finally, this isn't so much a tool, as a way to push the limits of the tools. This is where I put the tools together and make sure they all work together. It's already been useful to find limitations and prove the loose projects approach is capable. It's basically a proving ground, but I'll likely use it as a way to document all of the tools and demonstrate how they work together. It could also become a starter template, or at least the basis for one, in the future.
So that is some of the stuff I've been working on in my spare time. It's been a lot of work, but I feel like each tool is building onto the previous tool, so eventually it'll add up to saving time, I believe. The migrations and ORM alone have a lot of time saving opportunities, for myself anyway. I plan to add branching and more complex version control to the migrations. I also want to add the ability to export specific tables to create a new migration tree, so then it becomes a tool than can be used to spawn new projects. Learn from the best, then make things better :)
My interest in SurrealDB has really grown the past few days. I really feel like it can replace ArangoDB in my stack. The only issue is the same issue I had when I adopted ArangoDB: there aren't a lot of tools for Node.js. Like ArangoDB, I'll maybe have to build some myself. The first such tool is a CLI migration tool.
First of all, the Surrealist database manager application is awesome. It's great, it really is and, while ArangoDB has it's web client, it has functionality I missed using ArangoDB that I used to have for relational databases. That is a great tool, but it's more of a development and management tool. I need a migration tool for automation and to make my applications more portable.
Today I made a big push toward creating this tool and it's named Surrealigrate. I've built tools like it for other databases, such as the one we use for All The Flavors, Arangrate for ArangoDB, and I had initially built a multi-database tool for the CMS behind this site (now it uses Prisma, well, for now). Surrealgrate isn't quite ready, but like I said, it's getting very close. It's the first thing I've built from the ground up with AI assistance, which has sped up development considerably. Unfortunately, AI's aren't perfect, so there were a few issues and I had to rewrite portions of it, but most of the changes were just oversights that occurred as I asked the AI to add specific features in steps.
I need to build Surrealigrate up fairly quickly, so I can move some of my current projects to it and get them moving again. While it is already more advanced than my other tools have been, there will be more features coming later. Using AI allowed me to put in a lot of things initially that I wouldn't have had time to do right now. One different approach I'm taking with this tool is it's not intended to be an NPM package. It's intended to be included in a project as a component, potentially using git submodules. I'm hoping this approach makes it more useful per-project and will lead to others contributing.