SelfStarter: make Julia scripts self-starters

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I would like to share a package I wrote a first draft of today called SelfStarter. Essentially, it’s a way to make your script self-contained via a simple macro, @selfstart, and Julia’s standard library package, Pkg. It’s similar to Pluto but focuses on scripts. I look forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts.

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It is unclear to me what problem you attempt to solve. Could you elaborate?
If I want to run a julia script, I do julia script.jl (maybe with --project). What is different when using SelfStarter.jl?

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Yeah, this is fair. For anything more permanent than SelfStarter’s intended use case, using the --project option is more useful. The idea was to have a script that makes it easier to share scripts; essentially, it is for convenience, where the package shallowly scans the script for what dependencies are needed and creates a provisional package for the script to run in. Ideally, to run the script, all one needs to do is execute julia script.jl.

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Does that mean SelfStarter would download and precompile all dependencies?

I’m afraid that would lead to a horrible startup time, or did I misunderstand?

If one doesn’t want to add any runtime argument one can also activate the script specific environment by:

using Pkg; Pkg.activate(@__DIR__)

BR Stefan

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Does that mean SelfStarter would download and precompile all dependencies?
I’m afraid that would lead to a horrible startup time, or did I misunderstand?

Yes, the current version would be slow (possibly horribly) at first. The package caches the packages as a whole, so subsequent runs should be faster. I was thinking of adding a feature that would allow SelfStarter to consider using globally installed packages as well. If a package is already installed, it would default to the global version—think of plotting packages. I believe this is possible because Julia uses stacked environments.

If one doesn’t want to add any runtime argument, one can also activate the script-specific environment by: using Pkg; Pkg.activate(@DIR).

Very true! I have used this for some Jupyter notebooks. It can definitely be better for the use case where the script is embedded in a project directory. With SelfStarter, a goal is to make it convenient to share a Julia script via a single .jl file.

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You may find ShareAdd.jl interesting.

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