Building a Reporting Task with JavaScript and Wakanda

JavaScript is usually not the language system admins think of to handle building command line tools for automating system tasks. However, it turns out that it is perfectly capable of doing so. In this article we’ll take a look at how JavaScript can be used to build a command line tool that solves a reporting task. I was trying to find a way to extract reports from a MySQL database, putting them in a .csv file and sending the file in an email as an automated weekly report. Initially I tried using a Windows scheduled task or a Linux cron. However, because the application that populates the MySQL database was developed in PHP and because I’m more comfortable with JavaScript and Wakanda, I started thinking about how could I use my loved language JavaScript and Wakanda to achieve the result.