Open SaaS Tools

dope.sh - Diff Or Patch Executor

The dope.sh script allows you to easily create a diff between two projects (base and derived), or to patch those diffs onto the base project to get the derived one. This is useful when a derived project has only small changes on top of the base project and you want to keep it in a directory in the same repo as the main project.

Since derived apps (like opensaas-sh) are just the Open SaaS template with some small tweaks, and we want to keep them up to date as the template changes, we don't version the actual app code in git. Instead, we version the diffs between it and the template in an opensaas-sh/app_diff/ directory.

Usage

./dope.sh <BASE_DIR> <DERIVED_DIR> <ACTION>

<BASE_DIR>: The base project directory (e.g., base/app/ or template/app/)
<DERIVED_DIR>: The derived project directory (e.g., derived/app/ or opensaas-sh/app/)
<ACTION>: Either diff or patch
- diff: Creates a diff between the base and derived directories
- patch: Applies existing diffs onto the base directory to recreate the derived directory

The diffs are stored in a directory named <DERIVED_DIR>_diff/ (e.g., derived/app_diff/ or opensaas-sh/app_diff/).

Diff structure

The diff directory can contain .diff files to patch files from the base directory, and .copy files to copy files directly from the diff directory to the derived directory (useful for binary files).

Workflow

The typical workflow is:

Run dope.sh with the patch action to generate derived/app/ from base/app/ and dervied/app_diff/:

./dope.sh base/app derived/app patch

If there are any conflicts (usually due to updates to the base app), modify derived/app/ until you resolve them. Make any additional changes as needed.
Run dope.sh with the diff action to generate a new derived/app_diff/ based on the updated derived/app/:

./dope.sh base/app derived/app diff

Requirements

Running on macOS

If you're running the dope.sh script on macOS, install:

grealpath (packaged within coreutils)
gpatch
diffutils

You can easily install them through brew:

brew install coreutils # contains grealpath
brew install gpatch
brew install diffutils

The script automatically detects macOS and uses gpatch instead of the default patch command.