chalk VS Commander.js

4. Chalk

Chalk: Provides an easy way to stylize terminal strings with various colors and text formatting in Node.js, aiding in creating visually appealing command-line outputs

Chalk is a popular choice for adding colors to CLI output while maintaining readability.

Librerías: Chalk winston, log4js

Today the most popular library and de facto standard is the chаlk. The chalk has rich functionality, is fast but not ideal. It lacks some useful features.

This is a new tutorial on how to create a command line interface application, and our application today is a Mortgage Calculator. I used in this program packages such as 1- inquirer for interactive questions and answers: https://www.npmjs.com/package/inquirer 2- Sqlite3 DBMS 3- Chalk for colorful output in the terminal: https://www.npmjs.com/package/chalk

One of the libraries I used most that went full-ESM is Chalk. They released v5 over a year-and-a-half ago (November 2021) with ESM-only support and haven't updated v4 - their last iteration that supported CommonJS - since. If you go into their GitHub Issues section, you'll see a number of issues raised about CommonJS support, most of which are just responded to with a link to a post they made about switching over. Fair enough. I guess if I had to constantly answer the same question over and over, I might do the same.

To colorize my logs, I used a chalk package and created a logger utility:

We will add some dependencies to help us deal with CLI behaviours (inquirer) and text coloring (chalk).

Visit the Commander.js reference.

In the previous article, I looked at a Commander to configure and accept cli options and assign it to a variable called program.

You can write a command line utility using zx or commander.js. Hit a public api, spit stuff out in the console, etc.

In your index.js you can do whatever you want, even create an interactive CLI (check commander).

There is clearly a whole load of repetition, so this should be fairly easy to build and parameterise. Essentially this will all just be string building so we won't need to use any particular libraries for most of this script. We will need a way to call ffmpeg though - and ffmpeg will need to be present too, of course. To call a CLI command we can use the package commander.

Commander.js is an NPM package that makes it easier to build CLI tools. You can find its documentation over here

You can also use npm package commander to make more complex command line tool with lot of options and sub commands.

commander - npm - Required. A library that lets you define the commands and their arguments, options, help, etc.

Throughout my time writing and updating my static-site generator, I've been using npm from the very foundation I use an npm package called commander. Therefore, it is obvious that for the tool that I will be using to publish my ssg, I will do so with npm.

The command line has thousands of tools, such as awk, sed, grep, and find available at your disposal that cut development time and automate tedious tasks. Creating a command line tool in Node.js isn't very complicated, thanks to a powerful library like Commander.js.