debug VS Commander.js

Number of dependencies: one way to tell if a library is not too challenging to be used as study source is based on the production dependencies count. The fewer the better. For example, I chose debug because it only has 1 dependency (ms), while the rest of the code relies on core NodeJS modules - which is exactly what I was looking for - to learn how to build a library from scratch, not off the shelf libraries with many external deps, which in turn are based on more deps. There you go, dependency hell.

Another way to solve this is to have the logs in place, but only enable them conditionally. If you enable all the logs are the time, you only get a lot of noise that won't help you. If you are using JavaScript, you can use the package debug to add logs that are active by the DEBUG environment variable.

I'm using the debug package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/debug, but some reason I don't see millisecond diffs, which would be really useful.

Although it's used by Express, it's indeed more broadly, the way a popular NPM package called debug works, which is used internally in Express too. Under the hood, the debug package expects the DEBUG environment variable to determine what debug messages to print (could be on the console, or into a file, or into stdout to be collected by a log aggregator service).

Finally, if they're logs you want to be able to inspect in production without printing them to the console by default, you can use debug.

It is a drop-in, TypeScript replacement to enhance the widely popular https://www.npmjs.com/package/debug (230k weekly downloads).

debug - npm - Required. A popular library to write debug logs.

I strongly recommend using the debug package from NPM to organize your log messages

Use the [debug npm library](https://www.npmjs.com/package/debug) to disable your logging unless someone provides the right environment variable (e.g. DEBUG=* which enables all logging)

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.