Custom Commands

The idea of custom commands is that someone on a team defines a set of useful commands and stores them in the devspace.yaml, then commits and pushes this config to the code repository. Now, others can run these custom commands without having to remember all the details or having to read through endless pages of documentation.

Custom commands are being shared in the commands section of devspace.yaml:

# File: devspace.yaml
images:
  default:
    image: john/backend
commands:
- name: debug-backend
  command: "devspace dev --profile=debug-backend $@"
profiles:
- name: debug-backend
  patches:
  - op: replace
    path: images.default.entrypoint
    value: ["npm", "run", "debug"]

note

Custom commands can be used for more than just running devspace commands, e.g. they can run any other script or command, set environment variables etc. If you are familiar with the scripts section of the package.json for Node.js, you will find that devspace run [name] works pretty much the same way as npm run [name]

The above example configuration would allow everyone to run the custom command debug-backend like this:

devspace run debug-backend
devspace run debug-backend --verbose-dependencies
devspace run debug-backend -- --verbose-dependencies -s

And devspace run would execute the following commands internally:

devspace dev --profile=debug-backend
devspace dev --profile=debug-backend --verbose-dependencies
devspace dev --profile=debug-backend --verbose-dependencies -s

-- End of Options Separator

The -- between the command name and the additional flags for the command tells your terminal that the arguments and flags that follow after the -- do not belong to devspace run and should not be parsed. It is not required but often helpful to use -- when executing commands using devspace run.

Interactive Commands

Custom commands proxy input and output streams, so you can even share interactive commands such as devspace enter.

Configuration

name

The name option is mandatory and expects a string with name that serves as an alias for the command provided in the command option.

command

The command option is mandatory and expects a string with an arbitrary terminal command.

While you can run any devspace command, you can also run other commands (if installed), set environment variables or use bash style expressions such as &&, || or ;. To ensure that many of your team mates can run the command on any platform, it is highly recommended to keep your command expressions as simple as possible.

Cross-Platform

Write all commands in bash style. DevSpace is using a library to make them cross-platform executable.

appendArgs

The appendArgs option expects either true or false and will append given arguments to the command. If not specified, this option defaults to false.

Example:

commands:
# Running 'devspace run append my-value' will print 'my-value'
- name: append
  command: echo $@
# Running 'devspace run no-append my-value' will print ''
- name: no-append
  command: echo
# Running 'devspace run append-option my-value' will print 'my-value'
- name: append-option
  appendArgs: true
  command: echo

description

The description option is optional and expects a string with a description of what this command does and when it should be used. This is only used for helping other users to understand the meaning of a command and will be shown when the user runs: devspace list commands

Useful Commands

devspace list commands

Run this command to list all custom commands that are configured:

devspace list commands

devspace run dependency1.command

You can run a command defined in one of the dependencies of the current project like this:

devspace run [dependency].[command] [command-flags-and-args]

Working Directory

When running a command of a dependency, DevSpace will use the root folder of the dependency as current working directory when executing the command.