nvm VS shelljs

Let’s get it running locally first. You should have Node installed (you may also use nvm or docker).

Make sure you have node installed. If not, I recommend installing via nvm(Node Version Manager)

I was welcomed with an error that it couldn’t find npx command, which makes sense - I’m using NVM to manage node.

Reference: https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm?tab=readme-ov-file#installing-and-updating

If your Node.js version is below version 21, upgrade to the latest version. You can download the latest version directly from the official Node.js website or use a version manager like nvm (Node Version Manager). For example, you can use NVM to list all available versions of Node.js by running the following command:

Managing Node.js versions can be challenging, especially when different projects require different Node.js versions. Directly installing Node.js globally can lead to conflicts and broken projects. NVM solves this by providing isolated Node.js environments for each project.

Node Version Manager, or NVM, is a tool that helps manage Node versions and is a convenient way to install Node. Like npm or Yarn help manage Node packages, NVM specializes in Node.js version management, enhancing development flexibility and environment control.

If you don't already have Node.js 22.x, install it using nvm:

shelljs is used to run any other command-line programs through the shell.

When I need shell-like utilities from my JS scripts I've previously used shelljs [0]. It's neat that Bun is adding more built-in utilities though.

[0] https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs

Now we can open this new project and we're going to install one package, shelljs Shelljs is a great Command Line Utility for interacting with the command line in JavaScript.

Feels like this library is trying to solve a problem solved long ago by shelljs

The purpose of OP's project kind of reminded me of shell.js (shx) [1] which is a nodejs library that wraps all kinds of common UNIX commands to their own synchronously executed methods.

I guess that most shell projects start off as wanting to be a cross-platform solution to other operating systems, but somewhere in between either escalate to being their own programming language (like all the powershell revamps) or trying to reinvent the backwards-compatibility approach and/or POSIX standards (e.g. oil shell).

What I miss among all these new shell projects is a common standardization effort like sh/dash/bash/etc did back in the days. Without creating something like POSIX that also works on Windows and MacOS, all these shell efforts remain being only toy projects of developers without the possibility that they could actually replace the native shells of Linux distributions.

Most projects in the node.js area I've seen migrate their build scripts at some point to node.js, because maintaining packages and runtimes on Windows is a major shitshow. node.js has the benefit (compared to other environments) that it's a single .exe that you have to copy somewhere and then you're set to go.

When I compare that with python, for example, it is super hard to integrate. All the anaconda- or python-based bundles for ML engineers are pretty messed up environments on Windows; and nobody actually knows where their site-packages/libraries are really coming from and how to even update them correctly with upstream.

[1] https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs

`` When I then run this file with./bin/nodefile`, it exits, but the working directory of the current shell context has not changed. I have also tried shelljs, but that does not work either.

Oh people have tried - here are a few https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10239235/are-there-any-l...

I vaguely remember quite liking bish when I saw it years ago https://github.com/tdenniston/bish but it looks like no commits in 6 years.

This shelljs thing looks more promising, but really tedious to use https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs - shell.rm('-rf', 'out/Release'); I'd rather suffer proper bash than have to do that sort of thing.

Nothing seems to have really caught on so far. Bash is easy to learn and hack on, and before you know it, that simple install.sh that started out moving a few files around is 5000 lines, unmaintainable, and critical to bootstrapping your software :)

I personally prefer shelljs for stuff like this. zx seems pretty high on the "insane syntactic sugar" train.

As we are creating starter files, let's use ShellJS to run commands like git clone, mkdir...