Invision Development Helper (IDH)

   

Invision Development Helper is a command line utility designed to aid third-party IPS developers in their everyday workflow.

IMPORTANT: THIS TOOL IS FOR USE ON LOCAL DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENTS ONLY. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE SHOULD ANY OF THE PROVIDED TOOLS BE USED ON A PRODUCTION SERVER.

Installation

First, make sure you have installed the included Invision Development Helper.xml plugin onto your development site.

If you are on Linux, you can copy the idh executable to /usr/local/bin for convenience.

Otherwise, just extract the included idh file to the directory of your IPS installation and run it from there.

If the script is not being run while you are currently in your IPS installation root, you must set the path to your IPS installation in the IDH_PATH environment variable.

Features

Interactive console

IDH integrates IPS with PsySh via the console command, allowing you to quickly test and run IPS code directly from the command line.

Command line IPS installation

IDH includes support for downloading the latest IPS release and IPS development resources straight from the command-line.

This hooks into the same API that IPS uses when processing updates within your community. Meaning, obviously, you still need to provide a license key, username and password for it to work. This will then download the latest build available straight from IPS.

In addition to this, IDH now allows you to perform a complete installation of IPS from the CLI as well. This is built not only to make setting up local test and development environments easier, but to facilitate automated testing and pave the way for GitHub CI support in the future.

Application management

IDH includes a dedicated CUI allowing you to manage various aspects of your application from the commandline.

From here, you can

• View application information
• Build your application for release (more information below)
• Rebuild the application
• Build a new application version
• Enable/disable problem applications remotely

Build for release

The "build for release" function does all of the following things for you at once:

• Creates a new builds directory for you, which is organized by your applications long_version
• Rebuilds the application
• Builds and copies the applications PHAR archive, making sure to exclude tests, screenshots, and other undesirable folders
• Compiles and zips any documentation and license files (README.md, README.html, LICENSE.txt, ...)
• Compiles all development resources
• Copies over screenshotos in the screenshots folder (if available)

This way, everything is bundled up and ready to be directly uploaded to the marketplace. No having to manually copy or move things around, everything is sorted and compiled for you in an instant.

Proxy classes

Just as the old Power Tools application did, IDH provides the ability to generate "proxy" classes used to help your IDE properly resolve IPS' monkey-patched classes.

Even better, it can parse database schema files and automatically assign them as properties to their associated classes!

Support

• Clear IPS cache and data store remotely
• Remotely backup/dump your development servers database
• Run MD5 checks to find modified core files