The problem
I’ve been tinkering a bit with Elm lately. The super-enforced functional and minimal paradigm is very refreshing, and serves as a sort of detox after spending one too many hour stuck in Android’s not-so-lovely XML + mutating class world. Setting up a new bare minimum Elm app should be quite simple, but it turns out that there are a few more steps required than one would expect. My first instinct – being a React guy – was to try yarn create elm-app (or npx create-elm-app), hoping it would do the Elm-equivalent of what create-react-app does. Turns out, to my disappointment, that the end result leaves something to be desired. No proper live-reload out of the box, and a lot of the webpack stuff I was hoping to avoid completely with Elm. Yuck.
The simplest possible solution (that actually works)
At Vipps we’re passionate about simplification, in fact “world class simplification” is pretty much the headline of our company. So – being a Vipps guy – I thought: What’s the most minimal, easy, no-nonsense way to solve this? Is it possible – is it moral?! – to just add a "bin" entry to an otherwise vanilla package.json, pointing to a basic shell script? Turns out, it is! The following points to a simple (but perhaps not very pretty) index.sh – and it works like a charm*.
// Inside package.json:
"bin": {
"create-elm-live-app": "index.sh"
},
It’s published. You’re welcome :)
*: Probably not on Windows. ¯\(ツ)/¯