
This PR makes use of `node-ipc` to emit progress information from the child CLI to the GUI process rather than the tailing approach we've been doing until now. This change was motivated by the following Electron fix which landed in v1.4.4: https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/7578. Before such fix, Electron would not output anything to stdout/stderr if the Electron process was running with `ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE` under Windows, which forced us to implement `--log` option in the Etcher CLI to output state information to a file. Since this issue is fixed, we can consume the Etcher CLI output from within `child_process.spawn`, which opens more interesting possibilities for sharing information between both processes. This coindentally fixes a Windows issue where the tailing module would receive malformed JSON, causing Etcher to crash at `JSON.parse`. The reason of this problem was a bug in the tailing module we were using. Fixes: https://github.com/resin-io/etcher/issues/642 Change-Type: patch Changelog-Entry: Fix "Unexpected end of JSON" error in Windows. Signed-off-by: Juan Cruz Viotti <jviotti@openmailbox.org>
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Etcher CLI
The Etcher CLI is a command-line tool that aims to provide all the benefits of the Etcher desktop application in a way that can be ran from a terminal, or even used from a script.
In fact, the Etcher desktop application is simply a wrapper around the CLI, which the place where the actual writing logic takes place.
Running
We are not oficially releasing the Etcher CLI as a separate package yet, but you can run it locally with the following steps:
- Clone the Etcher repository.
git clone https://github.com/resin-io/etcher
-
Install the dependencies, using the instructions from
CONTRIBUTING.md
. -
Run the Etcher CLI from
bin/etcher
.
./bin/etcher --help
Options
--help, -h show help
--version, -v show version number
--drive, -d drive
--check, -c validate write
--robot, -r parse-able output without interactivity
--yes, -y confirm non-interactively
--unmount, -u unmount on success
The robot option
The --robot
option is very particular since it allows other applications to
easily consume the output of the Etcher CLI in real-time. When using the
--robot
option, the --yes
option is implicit, therefore you need to
manually specify --drive
.
When --robot
is used, the program will output JSON lines containing the
progress state and other useful information. For example:
$ sudo etcher image.iso --robot --drive /dev/disk2
{"command":"progress","data":{"type":"write","percentage":1,"eta":130,"speed":1703936}}
...
{"command":"progress","data":{"type":"check","percentage":100,"eta":0,"speed":17180514}}
{"command":"done","data":{"sourceChecksum":"27c39a5d"}}
The command
property can be used to determine the action taking place, while
the data
property contains extra information related to the command.
Exit codes
The Etcher CLI uses certain exit codes to signal the result of the operation.
These are documented in lib/src/exit-codes.js
and are also
printed on the Etcher CLI help page.