Checked into source control/ synced snippets that deploy to Val

[quuu]

One thing holding me back from using Val.town for serious endpoints is the fact that I have to leave my editor to go to Val and set things up:

would love to integrate Val into codebases/ source control -- for example I could have a folder: /src/jobs and making fetch_emails.ts and then pushing it to git would deploy automatically to Val.

And even further, doing something like:

export const cronSchedule = "* * * * 1-5" would trigger the job on a cron schedule

Making it so I can work in my own codebase, but still know that I'm able to set up recurring jobs that are checked via source control

[stevekrouse]

This is a great idea!

I suspect the initial version of this will likely be built in "userspace", ie it could be a Github App or Bot that uses the Val Town API to deploy your code to Val Town.

I think the hard part of this will be getting your vals to work in all the contexts:

1. When developing your other code locally you may want your val code to be iterating on Val Town in a branch. Could be neat to sync changes from Val Town to your file system.
2. When you push a pull request you may want a separate deployed PR preview val. Your code may need to get that val's URL.
3. There's the final deployed val that mirror your main branch.

We don't have first class branch support yet. One can simulate branches of a val by making forks and giving them branch names.

Alternatively, one could imagine a world where Val Town sends pull requests to your repo to update it on whatever the new changes are, if you wanted Val Town to be more the source of truth, but keep the repo updated.

[quuu]

I suspect the initial version of this will likely be built in "userspace", ie it could be a Github App or Bot that uses the Val Town API to deploy your code to Val Town.

Sounds possible! But maybe a bit too loose

When developing your other code locally you may want your val code to be iterating on Val Town in a branch. Could be neat to sync changes from Val Town to your file system.

Would love to see some local CLI you can run to simulate running in a Val Town environment, sort of like the Stripe CLI for webhooks (https://docs.stripe.com/webhooks#local-listener)

The other points are more difficult -- especially if you want to keep Val Town's current experience constant.

Main motivation for this request is I've seen lots of custom set ups just to get a cron/background jobs to work -- from Google Pub Sub, to a long running Node server, to secret endpoints where recurring hits are tracked in databases... and they all seem like second class/ third class setups with no real "native way" to integrate and create these sorts of jobs.

[stevekrouse]

Yeah I think we need to figure out the workflow story here. Great points! Vercel and Cloudflare have good local development workflows & easy ways to deploy.

Have you seen https://inngest.com? Curious if you like how they solve this problem. They're more in the Vercel/Cloudflare direction, all local development + an easy way to deploy