concurrently usage in n8n codebase.

In this article, we review Concurrently. You will learn:

1. What is Concurrently?

2. Concurrently in n8n codebase.

What is Concurrently?

Run multiple commands concurrently. Like npm run watch-js & npm run watch-less but better.

The usual way to run multiple commands concurrently is npm run watch-js & npm run watch-css. That's fine but it's hard to keep on track of different outputs. Also if one process fails, others still keep running and you won't even notice the difference.

Features:

• Cross platform (including Windows)

• Output is easy to follow with prefixes

• With --kill-others switch, all commands are killed if one dies

Learn more about concurrently.

Concurrently in n8n codebase.

I found concurrently in n8n codebase at packages/cli/package.json.

{
  "name": "n8n",
  "version": "2.36.0",
  "description": "n8n Workflow Automation Tool",
  "main": "dist/index",
  "types": "dist/index.d.ts",
  "scripts": {
  ...
  "dev": "concurrently -k -n \"TypeScript,Node\" -c \"yellow.bold,cyan.bold\" \"pnpm run watch\" \"nodemon --delay 1\"",
  }
}

Why concurrently? Like its explained above, concurrently provides outputs with prefixes when you have multiple scripts combined in a single script and is cross platform. I faced this issue in a project, on windows machine, where the dev script had & and as a result, it failed to run.

There are other scripts too where this concurrently is used in the same package.json file:

swift
...
"dev:worker": "concurrently -k -n \"TypeScript,Node\" -c \"yellow.bold,cyan.bold\" \"pnpm run watch\" \"nodemon worker\"",
"dev:webhook": "concurrently -k -n \"TypeScript,Node\" -c \"yellow.bold,cyan.bold\" \"pnpm run watch\" \"nodemon webhook\"",
...

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References:

1. npmjs.com/package/concurrently.

2. github.com/n8n-io/n8n/packages/cli/package.json#L15.