I am super excited to finally share with the world a tool that I have developed at the Sailscasts Company and I’ve been using to get more productive developing web APIs with Sails - guppy.
guppy is like the Sails console but way cooler and more developer friendly. At the Sailscasts Company we hold dearly the idea of building first the tools and products we want to use ourselves. guppy strongly aligns with this belief as it has become inseparable from our daily Sails development workflow.
What is guppy?
guppy is a desktop app(available for Mac, Linux and Windows users) for playing or tinkering with your Sails/Node.js projects. Out of the box guppy can execute any Javascript code. It also executes JavaScript code within the context of a Sails application.
What this means is that you get access to your Sails models and helpers using guppy.
Sails console vs guppy
One might argue that guppy is a glorified Sails console but one thing I am super proud about is that with guppy unlike the Sails console, you don’t need to restart guppy every time you make a change in your Sails project as guppy will execute your code off the current state of your Sails project. Pretty neat right?
What you can do with guppy
Currently guppy has improve my productivity time in my day to day Sails development by over 25% and here is how:
Easily test queries
In the guppy app you can easily take your time and construct queries and see the various results without wasting time by starting and restarting the local Sails server.
Test helpers
I like this one, I get to test my helpers without needing to create a route to see the returned value via a sails.log.
Execute any JavaScript code
What this means is that guppy can serve as a JavaScript playground where you can test out ideas in JavaScript
Conclusion
At the Sailscasts Company it’s no secret we are in love with the Sails framework. guppy is set to make development with Sails a little bit easier for the every day Sails developer. I have been using guppy every day since it was created and I hope it has that same effect on Sails/Node.js developers now that’s available to the world! Go grab yourself a guppy!