Checkscripts

Half checklist, half script. Incremental automation of repetitive tasks made easy.

Inspired by Dan Slimmon's idea of "Do-nothing scripting", Checkscripts allow you to programatically document a process. This gives the benefit of making the process easier to follow while allowing developers to incrementally automate it over time.

If you have a manual process, you can easily document it using a Checkscript and benefit from having this process stored in source control. When you have time to automate one part of the process, you can change that step over to a function:

import { checkscript, step } from "checkscripts";

interface ExampleContext {
  backupFilePath: string | undefined;
}

checkscript<ExampleContext>(
  "Restore a database backup",
  "This is our procedure for restoring a database backup."
)
  .steps(
    step("Retrieve the backup file", async (context) => {
      const file = await fakeApiCall();
      const path = await saveFile(file);
      context.backupFilePath = path;
      return `Backup downloaded successfully! Saved to \`${context.backupFilePath}\`.`;
    }),
    step("Load the backup data into the database", async (context) => {
      if (!context.backupFilePath) throw new Error("No backup file found");

      await importDataFromFile(context.backupFilePath);
      return "Backup data imported into database successfully.";
    }),
    step(
      "Check the restored data for consistency",
      "Log in to the database and make sure there are recent records in the events table."
    )
  )
  .run();

For more details on features and to see what it looks like when it runs, take a look at the npm package or GitHub repository.