Proposal: API for new envs

[apowers313]

The problem: Jupyter, the scientific notebook platform, is often derided for it’s lack of reproducibility. A big part of that is lack of transparency around environment configuration, which envinfo can help with. I’d like to make a magic command for the JavaScript Jupyter environment that reports on the environment, and envinfo covers 90% of the variables I want to report on. The problem is “how do I gracefully add the last 10% of environment”, such as Jupyter version and git hash?

Proposed solution: A simple API exposed by envinfo to register new commands to run. Something like:

const envinfo = require('envinfo');

envinfo.addHelper({
    group: “Utilities”,
    name: “Jupyter”,
    cmd: “jupyter”,
    args: [“—version”],
    resultsParser: function parser(stdout, stderr) { /* ... */ return “6.1.5”; }
});

The result would be a new line under “Utilities” that is “Jupyter: 6.1.5”.

I realize that I can exec my own code and parse the results, but doing that requires thinking of and handling all the scenarios that envinfo has already thought through (e.g. program doesn’t exist) and merging my results into the JSON object or Markdown.

Happy to submit a PR if this seems like a reasonable direction.

[ryhinchey]

this sounds like a great idea to me!