Commander.js VS listr

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.

I’m gonna make a console based application, asking user to make some choices, kicking off some async tasks, giving feedback etc. I’ve found inquirer and listr for handling part of this.

Major shoutout to listr + listr2 for being the motivation and visual inspiration for Tasuku, and for being my go-to task runner for a long time. I made Tasuku because I eventually found that they were too structured and declarative for my needs.

Remember the IF ELSEIF we had setup for arguments? Let's add a --help argument that lists out all the commands. Lists are a very important part of CLIs. I'm using a helpful package listr to handle these lists. Let's add the following code into our file in the place where we have our IF checks.

Basic things you should learn: - Dom manipulation - Http calls - Rxjs/promise - server side/ client side js - how frameworks use it - write script with listr (https://github.com/SamVerschueren/listr)