oxex

An oXygen project file to simplify common tasks in eXist app development.

The core file is oxex.xpr, an oXygen project file that defines a set of entries for oXygen's External Tools menu. Once you open the oxex.xpr file in oXygen, you will see a new menu in your toolbar:

These entries perform the following tasks:

• Upload the currently open file to eXist. The file is uploaded from its location on the filesystem to the corresponding location inside of /db/apps—the conventional location where applications installed in the eXist database. Also, you can delete the current file from eXist—all without drilling into oXygen's eXist Data Source.
• Fetch updates from the file's parent git repository. Without switching to or activating a git client.
• Build and deploy the app to eXist. Assumes your app can be built by calling its Apache Ant build.xml file that is commonly used to package applications into for EXPath Packages in the eXist community.
• Wipe the eXist database. Sometimes you just need a clean start.
• Open the current repository in commonly used apps like GitHub Desktop or Atom (pre-populating a .existdb.json file used by the Atom editor package for eXist-db)

These commands simply pass information from oXygen to the ant scripts.

Dependencies

• Apache Ant
• Apache Maven

To install these dependencies on macOS with Homebrew, just run brew install ant maven.

Setup

• Clone this repository to the folder where you clone your other eXist app repositories. For example, if you typically clone your repositories to your a directory in your home directory called workspace, you would clone oxex there too.
• Make a copy of build.properties, called local.build.properties.
• Supply the full path to your workspace directory in the property, apps.home; and supply your eXist credentials in local.instance.user and local.instance.password.
• Open the oxex.xpr file in oXygen, which will cause oXygen to open the Project pane with the parent directory, and which will configure an External Tools menu with oxex's commands.
• Select the "Setup oxex" command to download required libraries for interacting with eXist. This is only needed once.
• Using oXygen's project pane, open a file in one of your eXist applications (e.g., workspace/my-app/my-file).
• Select the "Upload current file to localhost" to upload the file to the database (e.g., /db/apps/my-app/my-file) (keyboard shortcut: command-u).
• Select the "Deploy current repository to localhost" to call the app's own build.xml file and upload and deploy the resulting .xar file (conventionally stored in the repo's build directory; keyboard shortcut: command-shift-u).

These functions can be called directly from the command line, but they are geared toward use from oXygen. Additional functions are contained in build.xml, which could be exposed if there is interest.