clipanion VS Commander.js

I maintain Clipanion, which we use in Yarn. I think you'll like it a lot if you work with TypeScript - it doesn't just has types, it also lets you strongly type your application - without any code duplication.

Let us introduce another alternative: Clipanion, a type-safe CLI library with no runtime dependencies, made with TypeScript.

Yarn supports writing plugins that can inject themselves into various places and leverage some of the builtin modules provided by the core. While we didn't get the chance to make all the improvements we hoped, we've still been able to upgrade the command line framework to Clipanion 3, which lets you write intuitive type-checked commands with a minimal syntactic overhead.

Hi me! 👋 I agree 100% All hail Clipanion!

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.