Getting Started

secco is a command-line tool for local development. It uses Verdaccio and direct file copying to apply your latest changes to other projects.

When developing and maintaining (multiple) packages, it’s a real hassle to use something like npm link. But you also don’t want to publish your changes to npm’s remote registry. Both have a lot of pitfalls as they might break on complicated dependency chains or symlinking.

secco solves these problems and streamlines the process of local package testing.

Install secco

Using a global installation:

npm install --global secco

You can also use npx to invoke it.

npx secco@latest --help

Note

For secco to work correctly you’ll need to have Node.js 18 or later installed.

Initialize a .seccorc file

In order to link the destination to your source (terminology explainer), secco utitlizes its own .seccorc configuration file. This way you only need to provide that information once, on all consecutive runs secco automatically looks in the right spot.

1. Navigate to your destination and run the following command in your terminal:

   secco init

2. When the prompt asks, “What is the absolute path to your source?”, enter the absolute path to your source.

   ? What is the absolute path to your source?
   ✔ · /Users/username/repositories/ai-magic

3. The prompt will show you a summary of what secco init will do. When the prompt asks, “Do you want to create the file?”, enter “Y”.

You should have a new .seccorc file inside your destination.

Caution

secco requires to either find a .seccorc file (with source.path set) or that the SECCO_SOURCE_PATH environment variable is defined in the destination.

Start secco

Before starting secco, you should ensure that your source’s entrypoints are available. This could mean that you have to compile your source files (ideally in watch mode). Otherwise secco won’t find anything to copy over.

Inside your destination, start secco like so:

secco

secco will now scan your destination’s package.json file and compare its dependencies/devDependencies with packages that it can find inside the source.

If necessary, secco publishes your source to a local Verdaccio registry. This won’t happen every time (especially on consecutive runs) as secco then just uses file copying directly. When Verdaccio is used, the terminal prints this:

[Verdaccio] Starting server...
[Verdaccio] Started successfully!
Publishing ai-magic@1.0.0-secco-1697394661753 to local registry...
Published ai-magic@1.0.0-secco-1697394661753 to local registry
Installing packages from local registry:
 - ai-magic
✔ Installation finished successfully!

In any case, when secco copies over the files from the source to destination you’ll discover a similar terminal output:

Copied index.mjs to node_modules/ai-magic/index.mjs
Copied package.json to node_modules/ai-magic/package.json

Now go back to your source, edit a file, and let the file be re-compiled. secco should copy over the new file into your destination again.

Want to follow a step-by-step tutorial?

We also have a Learn secco guide that goes into more detail of each step. You’ll work with a demo project and learn more about secco’s features.

What’s next?

Browse the CLI reference: commands, config options, and flags. You can also check out the advanced guides like Continuous Integration.