Today we're starting Statocyst, which we'll use for our project Squid. Statocyst is going to provide a typescript api for interacting with underlying Linux tools via their command line interface. First thing we'll do is create a new repo https://github.com/joyautomation/statocyst:

gh create repo joyautomation/statocyst --public --clone

which will create a folder for us to start in so we'll cd statocyst into that empty folder.

After that we run deno init to create amain.ts, main.test.ts, an initial deno.json. I like to name my entry point index.ts for libraries (instead of main.ts which I reserver for applications) so we'll:

mv main.ts index.ts
rm main.test.ts
> index.ts # clear out the contents of main.ts, we don't need them 🤗

The first thing we're going to need is a command.ts which is where we'll build our Linux command handler, which looks like this:

/* command.ts */
import { createErrorString, createFail, createSuccess, Result } from "@joyautomation/dark-matter";

export const runCommand = async (...args: ConstructorParameters<typeof Deno.Command>): Promise<Result<string>> => {
  const cmd = new Deno.Command(...args);
  try {
    const result = await cmd.output();
    const textDecoder = new TextDecoder();
    if (result.stderr.length > 0) {
      return createFail(createErrorString(textDecoder.decode(result.stderr)));
    }
    return createSuccess(textDecoder.decode(result.stdout));
  } catch (error) {
    return createFail(createErrorString(error));
  }
}

We're using our Dark Matter library, which provides us with some nice functional programming error handling utilities. The runCommand function will run a Linux command and return a Result with stdout or a failure with a message from stderr. This will be a great froundation for us to build our integrations.

With this powerful function we can actually start building out our other core features. We'll start with nftables.

Continue this journey in part 2!