So this week for our lab we did more practice with working with another person's repo. This week I decided to mix it up a bit and work on a SSG in JavaScript, so I made a pull request for Ritik's repository. Our task was to add a new feature that would allow the user to input a JSON config file as an argument, that config file would contain a JSON object with all the arguments the user wanted to use for the HTML output. Such as input file, output location, stylesheet, language, etc.

Once I had approval from the owner, the .md ticket was assigned to me and I started off by forking the repository and creating a branch to work on the issue (dhillonks/commandline-ssg:issue-8). The code in the repo was already organized into modules which made it easier for me to expand the parsing functionality. I ended up splitting the parsing method to add a flow for .md files. This ensured that I wasn't affecting any old functionality, leaving the parsing for .txt as is. After some coding, I was able to parse .md files and detect headings h1-h6. I used the first h1 text as the placeholder for . The tool could now also generate paragraphs properly for separated lines which were not headings. Moreover, both **bold** and __bold__ markdown syntax for bold text were supported. Along with these code changes, I also modified the Readme.md file to document this new functionality.

Creating a pull request to get the work accepted into the original repo

After I had thoroughly testing my changes, making sure that the new functionality worked and also ensuring that it didn't break any old functionality, I created a pull request on the original repository.

Link to the pr to commandline-ssg - Click here!

I included a description of the changes that were made, the functionality that was added and sample usage for .md files. I also pinged the code owner to review the pull request once it was created. Today, I just found out that my changes were approved and the pull request was merged!

Reviewing a pull request to cli-ssg

I also received a pull request to the open source tool I had created earlier.

Link to the pr to my repo - Click here

The pr was also adding functionality to parse .md files including the headings, bold, italics, links and strikethrough. It looked good at a first glance and the functionality mostly worked but I ended up finding a few issues after looking closely.
The biggest problem was that

paragraphs were not being generated for non-headings. This was obviously an big problem which I need to highlight.
Also, it rendered bold using and italics using which is not the best way to markup emphasis. So I suggested that bold should instead use and italics should instead use .
My last suggestion was not a bug, but since the PR was also implementing the syntax support for links, I wanted to make sure that it also supported automatic links i.e. links within angled braces should be rendered to an anchor tag.
I highlighted these and requested changes when I added my review to the pr. I look forward to reviewing the pr again once these changes are made.

He also helped me in reviewing and testing my code. I was eager for him creating issues so that I can work on them and improve my tool. His issues did not surprise me as I was sure I might have made a few mistakes during the development. He was able to find 3 issues in my code as well! He found issues of a typo, picking version from the file and program giving errors in special cases. I had a typing mistake in my code where I misspelled ‘successfully’ to ‘successfullly’. The issue can be found here. The second issue was versioning related as he suggested me to pick the program version from package.json which could reduce programmers work manually updating it in every file that uses it. And the last issue he found was input file/folder related in which he entered a file which did not exist. Instead of my program warning the user, it created an empty folder which was never expected. I later worked on all the 3 issues and resolved them ASAP.

At the beginning, I had no trouble reading his code because he's done it pretty clean and understandable. But everyone makes mistakes right, he also did :) He had a few typos in his code that could have been tracked by an extension in Visual Studio if he had used it (Code Spell Tracker) but that's no big deal at all Issue on github can be found here. After a few hours reading, I found another thing that could have been improved which is the program version. I read it online saying that the program version can be pulled off of the package.json so we don't need to hard code the program version everywhere Issue on github can be found here. The third problem that I found is quite important and it can lead to severe errors as he forgot to handle cases when users type in invalid files or folders Issue on github can be found here. Other than those small bugs, I couldn't find any other bugs as he did it very well.

GitHub Repo

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.