Sh

Who wants to use Bash or Ruby scripts to maintain your Swift project? Not me. Let’s use Swift.

Sh lets you reason about your script in Swift, easily calling shell commands and using their output in your Swift program. Or when orchestrating a build script, simply redirect all output to the terminal, a log file, or /dev/null.

For a full example of leveraging Sh on your iOS project, please see https://github.com/FullQueueDeveloper/SwishExampleiOSProject

Motivation

Bash scripts have gotten us pretty far, but it’s difficult reasoning about control flow. And there’s no type safety. Many command line tools already have decent interfaces, it’s just the control flow of that could use some improvements. Sh solves this by relying on Swift control flow.

Installation

Add Sh as a dependency in your Package.swift

  dependencies: [
    .package(url: "https://github.com/FullQueueDeveloper/Sh.git", from: "1.0.0"),
  ]

Writing scripts:

Fetching data from the shell

Here is a simple example, where we ask the shell for the date, formatted as seconds since 1970. We then parse a Foundation.TimeInterval, since it conforms to Codable. Last, we construct a Data, and print it.

import Sh
import Foundation

let timeInterval = try sh(TimeInterval.self, "date +%s")
let date = Date(timeIntervalSince1970: timeInterval)
print("The date is \(date).")

Supposing this was in a script named Date, a shell session might look like this:

 % swish Date
[Sh] Running `swift package --package-path Swish dump-package`, decoding `SwiftPackageDump`
[Swish] Running target named `Date`
[Sh] Running `swift run --package-path Swish Date `
Fetching https://github.com/FullQueueDeveloper/Sh.git from cache
Fetched https://github.com/FullQueueDeveloper/Sh.git (0.24s)
Computing version for https://github.com/FullQueueDeveloper/Sh.git
Computed https://github.com/FullQueueDeveloper/Sh.git at 1.0.1 (0.37s)
Fetching https://github.com/onevcat/Rainbow from cache
Fetched https://github.com/onevcat/Rainbow (0.21s)
Computed https://github.com/FullQueueDeveloper/Sh.git at 1.0.1 (0.00s)
Computing version for https://github.com/onevcat/Rainbow
Computed https://github.com/onevcat/Rainbow at 4.0.1 (0.30s)
Creating working copy for https://github.com/onevcat/Rainbow
Working copy of https://github.com/onevcat/Rainbow resolved at 4.0.1
Creating working copy for https://github.com/FullQueueDeveloper/Sh.git
Working copy of https://github.com/FullQueueDeveloper/Sh.git resolved at 1.0.1
Building for debugging...
[29/29] Linking Date
Build complete! (4.96s)
[Sh] Running `date +%s`, decoding `Double`
The date is 2022-08-10 18:08:24 +0000.

And if all the package have resolved, a shell session might look like this:

 % swish Date
[Sh] Running `swift package --package-path Swish dump-package`, decoding `SwiftPackageDump`
[Swish] Running target named `Date`
[Sh] Running `swift run --package-path Swish Date `
Building for debugging...
Build complete! (0.08s)
[Sh] Running `date +%s`, decoding `Double`
The date is 2022-08-10 18:09:53 +0000.

A more substantial example might query op or lpass for a secret, or query terraform output for information about our infrastructure, or query Apple’s agvtool for Apple version info of our Xcode project.

Long running scripts

This file might live in scripts/Sources/pre-commit/main.swift. Perhaps we want to run our tests, and confirm that the release build succeeds as well. Perhaps we want to see the output of swift test in our terminal so we can react to it, but we don’t really care to immediately see any release build output, happy to send it to a log file.

import Sh
import Foundation

try sh(.terminal, "swift test")
try sh(.file("logs/build.log"), "swift build -c release")

Architecture

Sh adds convenience extensions to Foundation.Process.

Construction

Sh makes it easier to construct a Foundation.Process.

init(cmd: String, environment: [String: String] = [:], workingDirectory: String? = nil)

Run

Sh makes it easier to run a Process. The basic method runs the process, and returns whatever is in standard output as a Data?

func runReturningData() throws -> Data?

Sh adds some helper methods that build on this. runReturningTrimmedString parses the Data as a String and trims the whitespace.

try Process("echo hello").runReturningTrimmedString() // returns "hello"

Sh can also parse JSON output. Given a simple struct:

struct Simple: Decodable {
  let greeting: String
}

We can parse the output like this:

let simple = try sh(Simple.self, #"echo '{"greeting": "hello"}'"#)
print(simple.greeting) // prints "hello"

Async/await

Yes, Sh supports Swift’s async/await. All methods have a corresponding async version.

Goals:

Enable calling command line tools easily from Swift, since Swift offers a nicer type system than Bash or Zsh.
Allow easy variable substitution in shell calls, and what was run in the shell can be announced to the terminal, for easy copy-paste

This package by itself does not try to provide a domain specific language for various tools. But there is a growing list of Sh-powered wrappers that offer a nicer API for some command line tools.

ShXcrun for a Sh wrapper around tools shipped with Xcode such as xcodebuild and altool.
ShGit for a Sh wrapper around Git.
Sh1Password for a Sh wrapper around 1Password’s CLI version 2.

Sh