meow VS boxen

As you can see, cli.tsx also looks pretty similar to React's root file, but, it has something more to offer using meow library. meow is a popular library that helps you build nice CLI applications gives you access to create usage docs and handles args and flags.

You will notice that it is using meow to read the command and flags. Afterward, it passes the flags to the ui component and renders it. meow is a helper library to parse arguments. The text passed to meow() is the help text shown when you call create-micro-service --help.

Here the App component is being imported using a special importJSX command. Meow is a library that allows us to make interactive CLIs. Here look at the render statement. A React element is being created where the App Element is passed as the first argument (ie the JSX part of the element) and then cli.flags is an arrow of props that will be passed into the element. This is where the name prop is coming from!!!

boxen

There are many tools available to help with styling your command line output. For my business card, I used a combination of boxen to draw the box around the content, and chalk to power the font styles and colours. I'll leave this part up to you, but you can view the code on GitHub to see how I did it. Be aware that if you want to use ES6 imports in Node, you'll need to update your index.js file extension to .mjs, and edit the package.json "bin" section accordingly.

Your CLI is complete now! One thing more that you can do is to decorate the output and errors with boxes and colors, we can do that using boxen and chalk.