Localpen

Quickly run and evaluate code with the speed of Bun.

Synopsis

I like to just run some one-off code snippets sometimes. There are browser-based solutions like CodePen or Stackblitz, but they come with their own editor and are inherently slow.

Localpen is a CLI tool that allows you to run and evaluate code with the speed of Bun. It creates a project folder in a temporary directory, opens it in VSCode and immediately runs the code in Bun using the bun watch command.

Opening in VSCode uses the --wait flag, so that closing the editor will tell Localpen to stop the evaluation and show a prompt to delete the temporary directory.

Usage

• Install bun:

  # Linux & macOS
  curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash

  # Windows
  powershell -c "irm bun.sh/install.ps1 | iex"

• Run localpen:

  bunx localpen

• Install localpen:

  bun add -g localpen

Templates

Currently, there are three templates available:

• TypeScript/ts
• JavaScript/js
• Vite/v

Tip

You can also specify any vite template directly, e.g. vue-ts

To use a template, run localpen with the -t flag:

localpen -t ts

Deletion behavior

By default, Localpen will prompt you to delete the temporary directory after the evaluation is complete.

This prompt can be skipped by passing the --keep (-k) or the --delete (-d) flag.

Todo

• ensure all the vite templates work
• list the vite templates in the help message