launchy
DESCRIPTION
Launchy is helper class for launching cross-platform applications in a fire and forget manner.
There are application concepts (browser, email client, etc) that are common across all platforms, and they may be launched differently on each platform. Launchy is here to make a common approach to launching external applications from within ruby programs.
FEATURES
Currently only launching a browser is supported.
SYNOPSIS
You can use launchy on the commandline, within the Capybara and Rspec-rails testing environment, or via its API.
Commandline
% launchy https://www.ruby-lang.org/
There are additional command line options, use launchy --help
to see them.
Using the BROWSER
environment variable
Launchy has a predefined set of common browsers on each platform that it
attempts to use, and of course it is not exhaustive. As a fallback you can make
use of the somewhat standard BROWSER
environment variable.
BROWSER
works in a similar same way to PATH
. It is a colon (:
) separated
list of commands to try. You can also put in a %s
in the command and the URL
you are attempting to open will be substituted there.
As an example if you set BROWSER=/usr/local/bin/firefox-bin -new-tab '%s':/usr/local/bin/google-chrome-stable
and you call
Launchy.open("https://www.ruby-lang.org/")
then Launchy will try, in order:
/usr/local/bin/firefox-bin -new-tab 'https://www.ruby-lang.org'
/usr/local/bin/google-chrome-stable https://www.ruby-lang.org
Additional links on the use of BROWSER
as an environment variable.
- http://www.catb.org/esr/BROWSER/index.html
- https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnvironmentVariables
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/environment_variables
Capybara Testing
First, install Capybara and Rspec for Rails. Capybara provides the following method:
save_and_open_page
When inserted into your code at the place where you would like to open your program, and when rspec is run, Capybara displays this message:
Page saved to /home/code/my_app_name/tmp/capybara/capybara-current-date-and-time.html with save_and_open_page.
Please install the launchy gem to open page automatically.
With Launchy installed, when rspec is run again, it will launch an unstyled instance of the specific page. It can be especially useful when debugging errors in integration tests. For example:
context "signin" do
it "lets a user sign in" do
visit root_path
click_link signin_path
save_and_open_page
page.should have_content "Enter your login information"
end
end
Public API
In the vein of Semantic Versioning, this is the sole supported public API.
Launchy.open( uri, options = {} ) { |exception| }
At the moment, the only available options are:
:debug Turn on debugging output
:application Explicitly state what application class is going to be used
:host_os Explicitly state what host operating system to pretend to be
:dry_run Do nothing and print the command that would be executed on $stdout
If Launchy.open
is invoked with a block, then no exception will be thrown, and
the block will be called with the parameters passed to #open
along with the
exception that was raised.
An example of using the public API:
Launchy.open( "https://www.ruby-lang.org" )
An example of using the public API and using the error block:
uri = "https://www.ruby-lang.org"
Launchy.open( uri ) do |exception|
puts "Attempted to open #{uri} and failed because #{exception}"
end
ISC LICENSE
https://opensource.org/licenses/isc-license.txt
Copyright (c) 2007-2020 Jeremy Hinegardner
Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.