coding-fonts VS Commander.js

More detail about the broken coding-font microsite of CSS tricks:

CSS Tricks had built a coding font microsite. In May 2022, less than two months after CSS Tricks got bought, the CSS Tricks microsite was broken, and someone reported an issue on Github[1]. Chris, who would be in an advisory role according to the Digital Ocean announcement, answered quickly:

> I’m afraid I’m not sure what Digital Ocean plans to do with it. I would, of course, vote for it to be re-hosted right at coding-fonts.css-tricks.com — and would be happy to help put it on Digital Ocean App Platform as well!

It was clear that Chris as an advisor wasn’t given any real access to decision-makers at Digital Ocean to make any difference in such a simple matter. It was such a simple and easy matter to solve that a bystander came forward and hosted the microsite somewhere else, ironically on Netlify [2] — a competitor to Digital Ocean.

[1] Github Issue Site redirects to CSS Tricks homepage: https://github.com/CSS-Tricks/coding-fonts/issues/116

[2] https://coding-fonts.netlify.app/

Projects: My-Grunt-Boilerplate, Simple-Offline-Site, coding-fonts

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.