Blaze by Fizzed
Fizzed, Inc. (Follow on Twitter: @fizzed_inc)
Sponsored by
Blaze is proudly sponsored by Greenback. We love the service and think you would too.
More engineering. Less paperwork. Expenses made simple.
Overview
A speedy, flexible, general purpose scripting and application launching stack for
the JVM. Can replace shell scripts and plays nicely with other tools. Only
requires a Java 8 runtime and adding blaze.jar to your project directory. Start
writing portable and cross-platform scripts.
Blaze pulls together stable, mature libraries from the Java ecosystem into a light-weight package that lets you focus on getting things done. When you invoke blaze, it does the following:
- Sets up console logging
- Loads your optional configuration file(s)
- Downloads runtime dependencies (e.g. jars from Maven central)
- Loads and compiles your script(s)
- Executes "tasks" (methods your script defines)
Features
- Write your applications (scripts) in whatever JVM language you prefer. Out-of-the-box support for
- Zero-install required. Just drop
blaze.jarinto your project directory and you or others can run it withjava -jar blaze.jar. - IDE support
- Small size so you can commit
blaze.jarto your repository - Excellent framework support for executing processes, modifying the filesystem, user interaction, http, and ssh.
- Easily use any Java library as a dependency to accomplish whatever the framework doesn't provide.
More documentation
What is a blaze script?
A Blaze script is a 100% valid JVM class with public methods that typically uses an empty (root) package declaration. Each public method becomes the externally accessible task that can be called from the command-line. Since most JVM languages support this kind of structure, Blaze can easily support a wide variety of JVM languages.
Install to your project
Download blaze.jar to your project directory. If you have wget available
wget -O blaze.jar 'https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/fizzed/blaze-lite/1.1.0/blaze-lite-1.1.0.jar'
If you have curl available
curl -o blaze.jar 'https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/fizzed/blaze-lite/1.1.0/blaze-lite-1.1.0.jar'
Or simply download the file in your web browser
and save it to your project directory with a name of blaze.jar
Write hello world blaze script in .java
Create blaze.java file
public class blaze {
public void main() {
System.out.println("Hello World!");
}
}Run blaze script
Since you named your file blaze.java, Blaze will find it automatically. You
can run it like so
java -jar blaze.jar
If no task is supplied on the command line, Blaze will attempt to run the main
task by default.
Write script that executes a process
Let's do a more useful example of how we use Blaze in many cases. Let's say you had a Maven project and wanted to execute a class with a main method. The syntax to do that in Maven becomes difficult to remember and communicate to other developers. Blaze lets you simplify the entry points to your project by exposing everything as named tasks.
import static com.fizzed.blaze.Systems.exec;
public class blaze {
public void demo1() {
exec(
"mvn", "compile", "exec:java", "-Dexec.classpathScope=runtime",
"-Dexec.mainClass=com.example.Demo1").run();
}
public void demo2() {
exec(
"mvn", "compile", "exec:java", "-Dexec.classpathScope=runtime",
"-Dexec.mainClass=com.example.Demo2").run();
}
}You can now just run these with java -jar blaze.jar demo1 or java -jar blaze.jar demo2
But I can still do your previous example in a shell script?
Yeah, I suppose so. But you'd probably use two shell scripts to define the
separate tasks and if you cared about platform portability, you'd be nice to
also include .bat scripts for Windows users. However, when you want to do
anything else that's remotely advanced, you'll start to appreciate having a
more advanced environment. Here's an example where we query git for the
latest tag and use it to update a README file with it. We use this as a way
to maintain a README file with the latest version pushed to Maven central
import com.fizzed.blaze.Contexts;
import static com.fizzed.blaze.Contexts.withBaseDir;
import static com.fizzed.blaze.Contexts.fail;
import static com.fizzed.blaze.Systems.exec;
import com.fizzed.blaze.core.Actions;
import com.fizzed.blaze.core.Blaze;
import com.fizzed.blaze.util.Streamables;
import java.io.BufferedWriter;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.nio.file.Files;
import java.nio.file.Path;
import java.nio.file.StandardCopyOption;
import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;
import org.slf4j.Logger;
public class blaze {
static private final Logger log = Contexts.logger();
private String latest_tag() {
// get latest tag from git
return exec("git", "describe", "--abbrev=0", "--tags")
.runCaptureOutput()
.toString()
.trim();
}
public void update_readme() throws IOException {
Path readmeFile = withBaseDir("../README.md");
Path newReadmeFile = withBaseDir("../README.md.new");
// find latest version via git tag, trim off leading 'v'
String taggedVersion = latest_tag().substring(1);
log.info("Tagged version: {}", taggedVersion);
// find current version in readme using a regex to match
// then apply a mapping function to return the first group of each match
// then we only need to get the first matched group
String versionRegex = ".*lite-(\\d+\\.\\d+\\.\\d+)\\.jar.*";
String readmeVersion
= Streamables.matchedLines(input(readmeFile), versionRegex, (m) -> m.group(1))
.findFirst()
.get();
log.info("Readme version: {}", readmeVersion);
if (readmeVersion.equals(taggedVersion)) {
log.info("Versions match (no need to update README)");
return;
}
// replace version in file and write a new version
final Pattern replacePattern = Pattern.compile(readmeVersion);
try (BufferedWriter writer = Files.newBufferedWriter(newReadmeFile)) {
Files.lines(readmeFile)
.forEach((l) -> {
Matcher matcher = replacePattern.matcher(l);
String newLine = matcher.replaceAll(taggedVersion);
try {
writer.append(newLine);
writer.append("\n");
} catch (IOException e) {
throw new UncheckedIOException(e);
}
});
writer.flush();
}
// replace readme with updated version
Files.move(newReadmeFile, readmeFile, StandardCopyOption.REPLACE_EXISTING);
}
}Optionally install blaze on your PATH
While you can invoke blaze.jar as an executable jar by running
java -jar blaze.jar
Sometimes it's more convenient to have a system-wide executable installed on your PATH to make that even shorter. Blaze has a built-in method to copy a wrapper script to a directory. On Linux or Mac OSX, you can run the following
sudo java -jar blaze.jar -i /usr/local/bin
On Windows, open up a shell as an administrator (Start Menu -> Command Prompt > right mouse click Run as administrator), then run the following
java -jar blaze.jar -i C:\Windows\System32
Depending on your operating system, this will install either a blaze shell
script or a blaze.bat batch script. Assuming /usr/local/bin or C:\Windows\System32
is already on your PATH (which normally it is), then you can now just run
the following in your shell
blaze
IDE support
A Netbeans-certified plugin is available for Nebeans 8.1+. You can find it in Netbeans 8.1 -> Tools > Plugins > Available Plugins > Blaze. The source code and project are here
Where to save your script(s)
Blaze is designed to play nicely with other popular JVM build tools such as Maven,
Gradle, Ant, SBT, etc. Blaze is also designed to play nicely with your favorite
IDE. If you are planning on a blaze-only project, then create a blaze.[ext]
file in your project directory (at the same level as your blaze.jar). Your
project directory would be
<project directory>/
blaze.jar
blaze.[ext]
The [ext] would be whatever JVM language you'd like to write your script in.
So java would be .java, groovy would be .groovy, etc.
However, if you are using another build tool such as Maven, we'd suggest creating
a sub-directory called .blaze or blaze and placing your blaze.[ext] script in there.
Most Java IDEs compute classpaths for auto completion based on directory paths
and placing your script in the root directory doesn't work very well with IDEs like
Netbeans. So a maven project + blaze would be
<project directory>/
.blaze/
blaze.[ext]
blaze.jar
pom.xml
In either setup, you'd run your script identically. That's because blaze will
first search the current directory for blaze.[ext] then .blaze/blaze.[ext]
then blaze/blaze.[ext]
If you'd like to have more than one script, you can supply it on the command-line like so
java -jar blaze.jar path/to/script.[ext]