offline support: run without needing to contact carbon server

[jokeyrhyme]

I'm wondering whether this is possible / desirable to be able to run this tool locally in an offline way?
Is this outside the scope of this project? Or would a PR be welcome?

[mixn]

@jokeyrhyme Thanks for your feedback. :)

While this should be possible, I don’t know how desirable or needed it really is, to be honest. It’d have to locally co-exist with the entire Carbon project, and carbon-now-cli is already quite big as is, mostly due to the usage of Puppeteer. It’d also assumingly add quite some waiting time before being ready and some (I think decent) amount of work to make it all happen for — in my opinion — quite an edge case.

Of course, this is just my opinion. :) I’d be curious to know more about the why’s of your idea.

TL;DR: I do rather feel like this is outside of the scope of this project.

[jokeyrhyme]

@mixn teehee
I didn't realise this CLI uses puppeteer to drive the remote carbon service, which itself internally uses puppeteer to render the code with canvas within a browser
I think this is the main rendering logic within carbon: https://github.com/dawnlabs/carbon/blob/master/handlers/image.js
This makes me wonder whether we could copy that into the CLI, which is already using puppeteer...

[jokeyrhyme]

@mixn in terms of use cases, I just prefer things to be offline whenever there's no special reason for them to require a connection
People don't always have a connection available, and people might not always be comfortable sending their code to a remote service

[mittalyashu]

People might not always be comfortable sending their code to a remote service.

Agree with this.

[jwkicklighter]

One way you could accomplish this is to setup carbon to run locally (or on your on server) and then add some config to this CLI that sets what remote server to use. Certainly not as nice as bundling everything, but an alternative that requires less from this project.

[mixn]

All technical things aside, I feel like all of this would be “taking away” from the hard work Dawn Labs have put into Carbon. This CLI should not “avoid” the service, but co-exist with it — since it wouldn’t exist without it in the first place. :)

[aibolik]

I think in the scope of this project it should leave as is.

Carbon is awesome, but I think it was supposed to use the website and mainly with gists. So, probably it is reasonable to think about another CLI library that does what carbon does without any internet connection, since it can be done(and it is what actually all famous IDEs do).

Internet connection can be used for fetching themes, additional plugins or/and gists, if you want to build image from gist.

I think that will be interesting challenge/project :)