A Day In The Lyf

One of my principal goals with mountebank is to make it cross-platform and as easy to install as possible.  Nikos Baxevanis showed the cross-platform nature of mountebank by using F# to verify SMTP calls from the system under test. I like this a lot; I think the .NET community has been under-represented by such tools in the past, and mountebank definitely aims to correct that.

I’ve started the process of creating self-contained packages for mountebank to make the installation as transparent as possible. Due to the nature of being a traveling consultant, I often bounce between technology stacks. Nonetheless, I find the process of having to install a JDK to use a testing tool when the rest of my stack is Microsoft-based to be a hassle. I love CSS transpilers, but I also find it taxing to set up ruby just to manage CSS when I’m developing Java. I don’t want mountebank to be a similar hassle, requiring node.js just to use. My goal is to make it as usable out of the box as possible.

The latest version continues to ship as an npm package. However, it also ships with several other options that allow you to simply download and run from a local directory, even without node.js installed, or to use a Linux package manager to install (again without node.js installed). There’s still quite a bit of work yet to do – getting the packages in the primary package repositories, and adding additional packages like homebrew.

What about Windows?

mountebank runs on Windows, but requires npm install -g --production. Without the --production flag, it tries to install some testing dependencies that don’t run on Windows. I definitely aim to follow suit with Windows (or get some help from friendly developers) to get an msi and self-contained zip file for Windows. Please do reach out if you’re interested in helping.