There are a couple of exciting releases going on around Helena land. First, Helena is finally up on the Chrome Web Store, so it’s now easier than ever to install the Helena Chrome extension. Second, there’s now a Helena Docker image if you want an easy way to run Helena programs headlessly or remotely.

Chrome Web Store

It’s up! I finally went ahead and put Helena on the Web Store - for free, of course. You can find it here. Now to be clear, it’s there, but it’s unlisted. That means you can find it if you have the link, but you won’t see it any search results. (The main reason is that Helena relies on a centralized server, and I don’t want to run up a crazy AWS bill just at the moment. That said, I’ll probably make the Web Store listing fully public eventually.) Even though it’s unlisted, you can always find its Web Store link from Helena’s own installation webpage: http://helena-lang.org/install.

Docker

If you’re looking to run some Helena programs headlessly, or if you want a fast way to get Helena installed on a remote machine, you’re probably going to want to use the Docker image. It’s all available on github: https://github.com/schasins/helena-docker. Just check out the README for a quick start guide. The Docker image can’t currently run parallelized Helena programs, but I’ll be adding support for that pretty soon, so stay tuned. (In the short term, if you need to run a parallelized program, there’s a utility script for that.) If you’re looking to do large-scale scrapes or automation tasks, you should definitely consider taking the Docker route. And don’t worry, if you still want to install Helena yourself and run it with the old utility scripts, I’ll keep those around.