The Thingpedia Command Line Tools offer a convenient and scriptable alternative to developing Thingpedia devices. Using the CLI you can work in your favorite IDE, test locally, then publish using your favorite CI integration.
The Thingpedia tools can be installed from the NPM registry:
yarn global add thingpedia-cli
The command is called thingpedia and should be in your path.
NOTE: this guide assumes that you're using the yarn package manager. It is possible to use NPM instead, but for reliable results it is recommended to use yarn.
To create a new project to develop Thingpedia devices, you can run:
thingpedia --developer-key <...> --access-token <...> \
init-project my-awesome-devices
cd my-awesome-devices
yarn
This command will create a git repository called my-awesome-devices,
and initialize it with the build tools to package devices and upload
them to Thingpedia.
It will also install the developer dependencies: eslint, nyc (code coverage) and the Thingpedia SDK. These dependencies should not be bundled in the devices you upload to Thingpedia, but are used by the test and packaging scafolld code.
The access token is optional, and is needed only if you wish to also upload devices from the command line. You can retrieve an access token from your User Settings page, and you can change the token later with:
git config thingpedia.access-token <...>
Inside a configured Thingpedia project, you can add a new device with:
thingpedia init-device com.foo
This will create a directory com.foo with a pre-populated package.json,
device.js, and manifest.tt files.
Tests are specified in tests/<device-id>.js. See
thingpedia-common-devices
for examples on how to write tests.
Once you have tests, you can run them with
yarn test
You can also test a single device with:
yarn test com.foo
Once ready, you can package your device with:
yarn make com.foo.zip
(a bare yarn make invocation will package all devices in a project).
While packaging the device, linting will automatically run, with our recommended configuration. This will catch early errors, such as syntax errors or variable name typos, even if you do not have unit tests yet. It will also ensure you do not use syntax features that are not available in Almond.
You can also upload the device to Thingpedia with:
thingpedia upload-device \
--zipfile com.foo.zip \
--icon com.foo/icon.png \
--manifest com.foo/manifest.tt \
--dataset com.foo/dataset.tt
Like with the web UI, --icon and --zipfile are optional after the first
upload, if they did not change. The zip file should also be omitted if the device
uses the Generic REST or RSS loaders.