⚡ powerpack

Supercharge your Alfred 🎩 workflows by building them in Rust 🦀!

🚀 Getting started

This project contains a powerpack crate which provides types for developing script filter Alfred workflows in Rust as well as various utilities that make it easier to build workflows. It also provides a command line tool to initialize, build, and install workflows built using the powerpack crate.

Firstly, install the command line tool. Now create a new project using a similar API as cargo new or cargo init.

powerpack new myworkflow && cd myworkflow

This will create a new Rust project as well as a workflow/ directory containing information about your Alfred workflow. The following will create a release build of the workflow and copy it to the workflow/ directory.

powerpack build --release

Now you can link it to Alfred. The following will symlink the workflow/ directory to the Alfred preferences folder.

powerpack link

Now you can run the workflow from Alfred ✨!

To package a .alfredworkflow file for release you can run the following.

powerpack package

The release will be available at target/workflow/myworkflow.alfredworkflow.

📦 Installation

Homebrew

powerpack can be installed from my personal tap which includes pre-built binaries.

brew install rossmacarthur/tap/powerpack

Cargo

powerpack can be installed from Crates.io using Cargo, the Rust package manager.

cargo install powerpack-cli

In some circumstances this can fail due to the fact that Cargo does not use Cargo.lock file by default. You can force Cargo to use it using the --locked option.

cargo install powerpack-cli --locked

Pre-built binaries

Pre-built binaries for macOS (aarch64, x86_64) are provided. These can be downloaded directly from the the releases page.

Alternatively, the following script can be used to automatically detect your host system, download the required artifact, and extract the powerpack binary to the given directory.

curl --proto '=https' -fLsS https://rossmacarthur.github.io/install/crate.sh \
    | bash -s -- --repo rossmacarthur/powerpack --to ~/.local/bin

🤸 Usage

The following is a "Hello World!" Alfred workflow built using powerpack.

use std::env;
use std::error::Error;
use std::iter;

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn Error>> {
    // Alfred passes in a single argument for the user query.
    let arg = env::args().nth(1);
    let query = arg.as_deref().unwrap_or("");

    // Create an item to show in the Alfred drop down.
    let item = powerpack::Item::new("Hello World!")
        .subtitle(format!("Your query was '{}'", query));

    // Output the item to Alfred!
    powerpack::output(iter::once(item))?;

    Ok(())
}

This would render an item as shown.

👷 GitHub Action

setup-crate can be used to install powerpack in a GitHub Actions workflow. For example:

steps:
  - uses: actions/checkout@v2
  - uses: extractions/setup-crate@v1
    with:
      repo: rossmacarthur/powerpack
  - run: powerpack package
  # produces an artifact at `target/workflow/{name}.alfredworkflow`

💡 Examples

The following projects are built using powerpack.

• crates.alfredworkflow
• github.alfredworkflow
• gitlab.alfredworkflow

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.