A node application to count lines within a files

Node with Mocha, Should and Sinon to count file lines

I've recently had the requirement to count lines of source code in 3 or 4 different code bases, including a couple of single page web apps written in javascript, angularjs and karma, a couple of java server side services and an acceptance test suite again written in java and selenium.

I wanted to compare the code bases and to look into the ratios of test code to production code so we as a team could get some collective feel for the entire code base, which to me was a very valuable exercise.
I decided to write a command line app in node and javascript, mainly because at the moment I’m trying to boost my javascript knowledge and I’m really interested in node. This command line app would count the lines of code in a code base. There is nothing better than a real requirement to spur you into action.
You can find the source code here: https://github.com/DamianStanger/lineCounter
I’m quite pleased how it has turned out but as is the way with every piece of software I’ve run out of budget (free time) before completion. But I would have liked to enhance it further if I could find the time.

Enhancements:

• Return a json string that has file and line counts for every directory in the codebase. This output could then be pushed into a d3 app to visualise the source code and the relative sizes, that would be cool.
• Ability to customise the ignored files and directories.
• Ability to hook into team city, this would need some new output reporter creating so we could track the lines of code over time.

Learnings

• I started off using Karma and jasmine for running the tests but found that they were difficult to get to play well with the node modules I created so I switched to Mocha (http://visionmedia.github.io/mocha/) glad I did, because I love it. I especially like the BDD style tests I can write with many nested describes to get the test context. I’m not sure how I’m going to cope going back to the flat structure of nUnit.
• I started to use Should (https://npmjs.org/package/should) as the preferred mechanism for asserting. The fluent interface is really appealing, it’s very similar to one I’ve been using in .net for a while now.
• I’ve needed to do a bit of mocking in this project and for this I found Sinon (http://sinonjs.org/ ). Very powerful and flexible, its been capable of meeting all my stubbing and mocking needs up to now. Bit of a learning curve but its all good.