golem VS literate-programming

This is the method I ended up using for golem (https://github.com/robsheldon/golem), a tool I wrote for executing server documentation on remotes. Shell quoting was by far the hardest part to get right, and the base64 pipe was the only solution that correctly handled all forms of quoting embedded in the scripts.

I've seen a few posts here recently on literate programming; I really hope it takes hold as a trend.

A couple of months ago I released a "literate devops" tool: https://github.com/robsheldon/golem/

It extends https://github.com/bashup/mdsh so that you can execute shell code, embedded in markdown, on remote servers. I hope someday that documented server management becomes the standard.

I use this pattern a lot along with a tool I built for doing server deployments and administration using plain old shell scripts and ssh (golem: https://github.com/robsheldon/golem/).

There are two caveats:

First, if there's any chance at all that the heredoc may contain a $, or a `, or possibly some other shell-magical characters, then you have to use a single-quoted heredoc:

  cat <<'EOF'...

A system that I created that does all of that is https://github.com/jostylr/literate-programming It does work and I tweak every now and then, but it certainly is not in an ideal state. It is a npm installable command line program and there is a 10% written book linked to from the README (free to read on Leanpub in HTML style). Almost every command is documented in there, but just barely.

It is a markdown-based tool. I had experimented with creating a different tool called pieceful-programming which would allow for changing the basic literate style (say instead of markdown, using asciidoc). But I did not complete it (yet?).

I used my tool for web programming, allowing me to freely arrange backend and frontend code as I see fit.