Copy URL To Clipboard On Npm Run Start
How to copy the start URL and parameters of your application to your clipboard while starting it locally.
I am not sure anyone will ever need the following tricks but, at my client’s place, we have an application which can only be accessed through an URL which contains a dynamic base64 parameter. Needless to say, it makes its local development a bit inconvenient.
In addition, I have to admit, I am not a big fan of CLI’s options which can automatically open browser. Even though I mostly use the Chrome Incognito mode for development purpose, I like to switch often between browsers to try out what I developed.
Finally, I don’t use bookmarks (don’t judge me) and, I often switch between technologies. Therefore, without configuration, every time another port has to be used ( :3333 or :4200 or :8000 or :8100 etc.).
That’s why I had the idea to add a pre-start script to the application which should copy the start URL of the application to my clipboard. Doing so, I can then just select a browser, paste the URI and, I am good to go.
Dependencies
In order to copy or read value to the clipboard from a NodeJS script, I used the library clipboardy which implement such a cross-platform feature.
In addition, I also added chalk and boxen to print out the URL to the console in a stylish way.
You may notice that all these dependencies are open source and developed by the same person, Sindre Sorhus, which definitely deserve a shout-out for this awesome contribution and work 👍.
npm i clipboardy chalk boxen --save-devScript
Once the dependencies fetched, I created the pre-start script itself. In this example, I create a file start-url.js at the root of the project.
The script primary generates the url which I am looking to copy in my clipboard. On purpose, I am using an Hello World 👋 string to demonstrate that it is possible to encode complex parameters.
To print out a nice message, I use chalk with colors, in for- and background, and the bold option. I use \n\n to create newlines. It is worth…
