Constellation - extensible dev console

announce
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constellation:console is a fork of the popular msavin:mongol package. The key difference of Constellation is that it provides an API that allows any dev to extend/configure the console via plugin packages.

Examples of plugins are:

babrahams:temple (for visualizing template information)
constellation:session (for viewing / manipulating data in the Session variable)
constellation:subscriptions (for viewing current subscriptions)
constellation:autopublish (for toggling autopublish behaviour)
constellation:tiny (for really minimizing the UI)
lai:ddp-inspector (for visualizing data flow client <ā€“> server)
constellation:position (for positioning the UI)
constellation:velocity (for test results in your dev console)

To take a quick look:

meteor add constellation:console constellation:subscriptions constellation:autopublish constellation:session babrahams:temple constellation:tiny

CTRL + C to toggle console on/off

To remove the parts you donā€™t like or wonā€™t use, type things like:

meteor remove contellation:tiny

Note: there are also a couple more built-in tabs that can be revealed via the ā€œConfig ā€¦ā€ panel

If Constellation is not for you:

meteor remove constellation:console constellation:subscriptions constellation:autopublish constellation:session babrahams:temple constellation:tiny

ā€¦ no harm done.

Will happily accept PRs or work with devs to extend the existing API to allow for creative new plugins. This projectā€™s intention is to be collaborative and open source.

same post on crater.io

15 Likes
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Loving the idea! Always wanted more dev tools from devtools extensions, I bet one can put Velocity reporter there too (if needed). Hope the idea and the project will strive to success.

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Thanks for the support @slava. I took the idea of putting a Velocity reporter into Constellation as a little coding challenge and now you can

meteor add constellation:velocity

to get a fork of velocity:html-reporter that shows up in Constellationā€™s UI.

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Iā€™ve just released a distro for Constellation, that gives you a lot of functionality out of the box:

meteor add babrahams:constellation

A demo is available on Meteorpad, that steps you through the basic use of the included packages.

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Just installed it. Awesome work. Like a ā€˜mongolā€™ on steroid.

Got a question : is it possible for the interface by default (not tiny or fullscreen) to extend to the size of the text inside ? Iā€™ve got some collection that have long names and that makes it difficult to see the one i wantā€¦

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Iā€™ve raised this as a Github issue and will consider including this in the console core for next minor release.

Iā€™ve got a feeling, though, that this could be done right now through a plugin package. If you could leave a few more details about what youā€™re after in the Github issue, I might be able to put something together sooner rather than later ā€“ Iā€™ve left some questions for you there.

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I donā€™t have a github account (bitbucket) so iā€™ll answer your questions here if thatā€™s ok with youā€¦

So yes, itā€™s the length of field names (for collection in that case).
The result being that i canā€™t really select the proper collection before opening one and also, the number of documents is sort of mixing with the name.

See here :

Thanks a lot :wink:

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Okay, got it. Thanks. Iā€™ll post any progress with this here.

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This package will give you an extra 9 characters or so. :smile:

constellation:shorten-collection-names

Itā€™s ā€œset and forgetā€, so once youā€™ve clicked the tab to shorten the collection names, hide the tab via the config panel and it should remember that setting on page refreshes, etc.

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That was fast ! Thanks :wink:

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Yeah, thatā€™s the idea with Constellationā€¦

Donā€™t have something you need in your dev console? Whip it up in a package and plug it in.

Incidentally, does the package do what you need it to? If not, feel free to fork and modify.

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Hereā€™s a fun package for Constellation: SimpleSchema generator.

  1. Video demo.
  2. Follow up demo.

Donā€™t expect too much from this plugin :smile: ā€“ any generated schema will need to checked over and tweaked. The only fields it attempts to guess are type, label, optional and blackbox.

Still, it saves a bit of tedious typing time ā€¦

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Demo site for Constellation
Source for demo site

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Constellation has genuinely been making my development life easier lately, so I thought Iā€™d share a brief video showing one use case.

Please excuse the background noise ā€“ thatā€™s my 4 year old watching a Chinese overdub of ā€œMy Little Ponyā€.

3 Likes
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Links to both previous demo sites (on Meteorpad and meteor.com free hosting) are history, so hereā€™s the Constellation demo at a new URL:

http://constellation.taonova.com/demo

1 Like