🤖 Automating my website: creating a blank new note

Published on 2023-01-26

Being the optimistic man that I am, I automated the creation of an empty new note file in my website project.

I’m using this website to play around with technologies I normally don’t get to use at work (like Astro or Tailwind), so I thought I would learn a bit about the latest version of Node.js and boy have things changed!

When I say “automate the creation of an empty new note” I mean a script that creates a Markdown file in the correct folder, with the correct file name and with the frontmatter I always copy paste from one note to the other. This should be easily doable by prompting the user (me) for the title with the process module, generating the content of the file and writing it into a file with the fs module.

Turns out the API for reading input from command line has been greatly simplified in Node.js v18:

import * as readline from "node:readline/promises";
import { stdin as input, stdout as output } from "node:process";

const rl = readline.createInterface({ input, output });
const title = await rl.question("Title: ");

// stuff happens...

rl.close()

The content I want is just the frontmatter:

const content = `
---
layout: ../../layouts/MarkdownNoteLayout.astro
title: ${title}
publishedAt: ${new Date().toISOString().split("T").at(0)}
tags: []
draft: true
---
`.trim();

In order to write the file in the correct directory I need the directory of the file I’m executing to make a relative path for the new file (editing note: this sentence makes no sense). In the past I used the global __dirname but I quickly found that it’s not a thing anymore. A quick search tells me the way to go is:

import { fileURLToPath } from "node:url";
import { exec } from "node:child_process";

const __filename = fileURLToPath(import.meta.url);
const __dirname = path.dirname(__filename);

All there’s left is to write the file:

const __filename = fileURLToPath(import.meta.url);
const __dirname = path.dirname(__filename);
const noteFileName = title.toLowerCase().replaceAll(" ", "-");
const noteFilePath = path.join(
  __dirname,
  "..",
  "content",
  "notes",
  `${noteFileName}.md`
);

writeFileSync(noteFilePath, content);

As a finishing flourish, I thought it would be cool to automatically open the file in my code editor, which I can do with a simple exec call:

import { exec } from "node:child_process";

exec(`code ${noteFilePath}`);

To execute the script I just added it to my package.json:

{
  "scripts": {
    "new-note": "ts-node src/scripts/new-note.ts"
  }
}

I’m using ts-node to directly execute the TypeScript file and not bother compiling.

You can find the entire script in the GitHub repo for my website.