Increasing productivity by automating common actions on OSX

by Richard Bradshaw

Every time I do some web development there are a few things I need to do:

  • Point MAMP to the correct folder and enter password (as I’m serving on port 80)
  • Open the folder in Textmate
  • Open two tabs in iTerm
  • Run livereload in iTerm in that directory
  • Run SASS pointing at CSS in a subdirectory, again in iTerm
  • Open a tab in Chrome pointing at localhost

Each of these takes a few seconds to remember/type the command. Wouldn’t it be nice to speed things up?

First thing I’ve done is to point MAMP at the ~/activeSite, and never change it. To get content there I’m going to symlink the real directory to there, so I don’t have to mess around with MAMP.

Second thing is to declare a couple of bash functions. I’d recommend putting these into your ~/.bashrc file. Remember to run source ~/.bashrc after editing that file to get the new code to work.

I keep all my websites in ~/website, and all have a subdirectory called media, with subdirectory inside that called css. You’ll need to modify this to work for your set up. To run this, type editsite SITE_DIRECTORY_NAME in bash.

?View Code BASH
editsite() {
 
rm ~/activeSite
ln -s ~/websites/$1 ~/activeSite
 
osascript -e "
tell application \"iTerm\"
	tell the first terminal
		tell the last session
			write text \"cd ~/websites/$1/\"
		end tell
	end tell
 	tell the first terminal
		launch session \"Default Session\"
		tell the last session
			write text \"mate ~/websites/$1\"
			write text \"cd ~/websites/$1\"
			write text \"livereload\"
		end tell
	end tell
	 tell the first terminal
		launch session \"Default Session\"
		tell the last session
			write text \"cd ~/websites/$1/media/\"
			write text \"sass --style compressed --watch css:css\"
		end tell
	 end tell
end tell
tell application \"Google Chrome\"
	set newtab to make new tab at end of tabs of window 1
	set URL of newtab to \"http://localhost/\"
	activate
	tell application \"System Events\" to keystroke "r" using command down # Anyone know how to do command shift down?
end tell"
}

This does pretty much what you’d expect. You could use a docstring instead of this if you wanted, but I’m happy with escaped “s.

This is all well and good, but sometimes I can’t remember what I called the directory, so here’s another function that lets me check, even if I’ve already started typing editsite.

?View Code BASH
editsites() {
	cd ~/websites
	ls -d */
}

This just lists the directories in my websites directory.

Any improvements, let me know!

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