The idea was to help developers share their code with AI assistants like ChatGPT. As someone who often struggles to explain my code structure to AI, I needed to build a tool that could take an entire project and package it into a single, readable text file.
I chose Node because I'm comfortable with JavaScript, and Node has great built-in modules for file system operations. Setting up the GitHub repo was straightforward - picked the MIT license, wrote a basic README, and I was ready to code.
The required features came together piece by piece:
CLI Arguments: I discovered Commander.js, which made parsing command-line arguments trivial.
Git Integration: This was trickier. I used Node's child_process to run git commands and parse the output. The challenge was handling non-git directories gracefully - not every folder is a repository.
Output Formatting: Creating a nice tree structure for the directory layout was surprisingly satisfying. I spent too much time making the ASCII art look just right with proper indentation and tree characters.
File Truncation: Large files needed special handling. It decided on a 16KB limit with a clear "[truncated]" marker. This keeps the output manageable while still providing useful context.
I implemented 3 optional features in this tool which are 'Gitignore Integration', 'Output to File' and 'Binary File Handling'. Based on my personal experience, these 3 features will help me reduce much more time to get the file I need.
Building this tool taught me that real-world software is 20% implementing features and 80% handling edge cases. Every simple feature like reading a file has dozens of ways it can fail. Good software anticipates these failures and handles them gracefully. The most satisfying moment was using my own tool to share its code with ChatGpt for help with a bug. Looking back, I would have started with better error handling from day one. Adding it retroactively was painful. But overall, I'm proud of what I built. It's not perfect, but it solves a real problem I face regularly. And now when I need to share code context with an AI, it takes 2 seconds instead of 2 minutes of copy-pasting.
The tool is available at: Repository-Context-Packager
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